Guest Post by Edward Curtin
Nothing is more real than nothing.”
Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies
Those who are never lost are forever lost. Only those who know they are lost and that life is a shipwreck have a chance to find their way to shore.
The world’s great religions, including Taoism and Existential philosophy, understand that at the heart of human existence is the presence of the not (death, emptiness, void), but this negative reality, this “nothingness” interpenetrates with the positive of being alive so that our knowledge coincides with our ignorance, our lives with our death, and our truth with untruth.
This is also common sense.
Everyone is a pilgrim on the way, and because there are no maps, we all get lost. And it is only by getting lost in a deep sense that we can find ourselves and discover the truth about the world.
It is well known that Ernest Hemingway made famous the phrase “the lost generation” when he opened his novel The Sun Also Rises with the epigram “You are all a lost generation,” attributed to Gertrude Stein, who said she heard it from a garage owner who said it about a young auto mechanic in his employ.
It is less well known that Hemingway later wrote “that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be …But to hell with her lost-generation talk and all the dirty easy labels.”
He was thinking of how the madness of war with the calls to patriotism and God and country and the never-ending official lies about everything maimed people at very deep levels. His words in A Farewell to Arms have lasted because they are so true in their dismissal of abstract obscenities and their embrace of the concrete:
I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain …. And I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards of Chicago if nothing were done with the meat except to bury it …. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
No doubt he was also thinking of the existential anxiety of being alive and the fear of death and nothingness that is conveyed in his powerful short story, “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” that appeared in the 1930 volume Winner Take Nothing. He was well acquainted with nothing (the not, nada) and knew that social circumstances only add to it, particularly wars and the nihilistic death wishes of lying political leaders.
Some say nothing has changed for millennia and that every age is similar and people are the same, always complaining about the present and recalling the good old days. There is some truth in this, but the issue of assessing today in all its uniqueness remains paramount. For every age and every generation is different; therein lies its potential and dangers.
Each can only be understood within its place and time. We live in the era of high technology that has never before existed. It is unique. And it is uniquely dangerous.
Today is a time of unprecedented official lies about everything, endless wars hot and cold, class wars of the rich against the poor, medical wars of international elites against everyone, etc. – it is a daily electronic digital barrage meant to pound people into the deepest despair.
Call it “The Lost World of the Information Superhighway.” These lies have sown a vast sense of bewilderment, as intended.
Lostness for so many, including those who don’t know it and take those lies for truth. People who don’t know that there are still places, although they are shrinking, where truth can be found. The problem is, of course, that even when they are told about media sites and writers that operate honestly and outside the propaganda mill, they usually refuse to go there.
They prefer to live inside what Jim Garrison, the former New Orleans District Attorney who brought the only trial in the assassination of President Kennedy, correctly termed “the Doll’s House.”
Picking through the bins at the lost and found on the Internet, which is dominated by intelligence services and their Silicon Valley big tech partners, many who feel lost find “things” they think they have lost but which are counterfeit. They cling to them as to false gods, not realizing that they have been placed there by the elite mountebanks and their accomplices, a process similar to a document dump that contains fabricated records.
It is an old trick.
Often what is really lost is the sense that life makes sense and is meaningful, but this awareness is often replaced with shards of false reassurance meant to distract and far too much information for anyone to comprehend.
What’s up? Check your cell phone and head down the primrose path to unreality.
Just as there are two senses to being lost, one based on the awareness that if we refuse to grasp at straws and proceed through life by faith, the unknown road will bear us up (Thoreau said, “How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it…”), and the other being the more socially induced one of incessant propaganda, so too there are two ways of thinking about nothing.
The existential sense as described by Hemingway in his famous story mentioned above, and the sense of trivia or superficial preoccupations that distract. C.S. Lewis described the latter sense very well:
The Christians describe the enemy as one ‘without whom Nothing is strong’. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.
This is a perfect description of the passivity of scrolling the internet or social media. Much ado about absolutely nothing but distractions. Tranquilized by trivia.
Our current situation has been long in coming. Back in the early 1960s, there was a highly touted intellectual named Marshall McLuhan whose 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, was gobbled up by the baby boomers raised on television, whose rebellious members protested the inhumanity of IBM computer technology of that time.
Ironically, it was members of this generation who later created the computer revolution and have promoted the digital revolution. They carry cell phones as sidearms to defend themselves from reality.
Newsweek called McLuhan “the oracle of the New Communications.” He was an obscurantic celebrator of the electronic media and retribalized man long before the Internet, cell phones, personal computers, and digital mania. McLuhan’s paeans to technology sounded very profound and liberating with their vaguely Gnostic and Jungian rhetoric, which also fit with the 1960s “vibes.” He called the electronic media our gods whom we must serve, for they in turn would liberate us.
He gave life to things while taking it from persons. He wrote:
Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electronic technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other extensions of his physical organs. But there is this difference, that previous technologies were partial and fragmentary, and the electric is total and inclusive. An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness. [my emphases]
Clearly this was a message of a prescient religious crank: mystical, mythological, technological nonsense perfectly in tune with the dawning new age. Not any coming of the Age of Aquarius, however, but that of the Age of Digital Control and endless wars.
By turning the person inside out and giving life to things, McLuhan was certainly anticipating and promoting the developments of the past forty years. His ideas gave legitimacy to the passivity of the person in the face of the burgeoning mass media consumer culture. They supported the growing commodification of all aspects of life, especially people.
By externalizing the person, McLuhan was eliminating the idea of the autonomous self and opening the way for today’s era of consumers, blank screens for the reception of advertising, public relations, and propaganda on a vast scale.
In fact, what he wrote of television runs deeper for cell phones and computer screens. “ … with TV,” he wrote, “the viewer is the screen. He is bombarded with light impulses that James Joyce called the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ that imbues his ‘soulskin with subconscious inklings.’ “
Inklings of abstract obscenities at war with the lost world of reality.
While many people sense this, they still embrace their killers, feeling that they would be lost without them. They have become appendages of their electronic appendages. The current push to transform all person-to-person life into a digital one run by Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies with its mass surveillance powers is recognized by many but dismissed as a weird conspiracy.
This is so far from the truth. A good indicator of this nonchalant attitude toward such developing trends is the vastly increased popularity of on-line shopping. Its innocence conceals the future that is coming.
I recently won a very high-tech-looking electric toothbrush at the dentist. When I opened it, I discovered it contained a gadget with a suction cup that could hold a “smart phone” that you could attach to the mirror. The phone could electronically be linked to the toothbrush and it would monitor your brushing as you watched yourself brush. Poor me, I felt so stupid: a man without a smart phone!
While everybody knows that the boat is leaking and the captain lied, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, such knowledge is abstract. It is a sort-of knowledge, sensed but also denied. Real but unreal. Known but unknown. And that’s how it goes.
It is very difficult for many conventional people to admit that the life they have known is disappearing while they dawdle in fantasy land, believing the propaganda of their rulers. To live in the U.S.A. is to live in Neverland where no one ever has to be alone, never grow up, and always be “in touch” through the ether. It is a country of lost children.
You can choose any issue of importance and its official explanation is certain to be untrue, obvious or subtle propaganda.
The lies about Ukraine and Russia; Covid-19, lockdowns, and vaccines; China and Taiwan; US forces in Syria and US support for Israeli aggression against Syria and the Palestinians; its support for Saudi Arabia’s ruthless policies and war against Yemen; the economy, central banking, and inflation; the increasing censorship of dissident voices; digital IDs, digital programmable currencies, and social credit systems; the persecution of Julian Assange; the Great Reset; a series of binaries meant to suggest false alternatives, etc.
The list is endless. All official lies to support a sinking ship captained by psychopathic liars seemingly intent on a world war that will destroy the world. Melville’s Captain Ahab writ large. Like those traveling on the Titanic, today’s passengers on the flailing American empire’s Good Ship Lollipop are in for a surprise, and it won’t be a sweet trip to a candy shop.
Hemingway was surely right that “Winner Take Nothing.” Yet losers also exit empty-handed. Everybody knows this but goes on surrounding themselves with stuff, lots of things. Hoarders are a popular TV subject because they represent the extreme form of this madcap method of trying to secure oneself from loss.
It is a form of mental and spiritual despair that could only exist in advanced capitalist consumer society. Too many possessions and too much information. Cluttered minds, cluttered abodes. There is a reason why the world’s poor are called the dispossessed. One could say hoarders are the possessed, and it is a form of demonic possession.
Recently I was called upon to help a hospitalized elderly relative by checking on her house. The house is filled from attic to basement, in every nook and cranny, with collected things that serve no life purpose but were kept to provide a security blanket that was really a strangulation cord.
I will spare you the details, except to say that this relative is an intelligent woman, as was her deceased husband, and yet they surrounded themselves with so much “stuff,” never threw things out, kept papers from 70 years ago, old keys and coins, empty jewelry boxes by the score, etc. An overwhelming scene to behold. And why did they do this? Because they thought they were protecting themselves against loss, against nothing, nada.
As T. S. Eliot wrote in The Wasteland: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” But there is nothing that will protect against the loss Eliot was referring to – the social, psychological, and spiritual fragmentation of Europe as a result of World War I. A wasteland created by politicians. Like today.
We too are now living in a wasteland, and the only way to find our way forward is to acknowledge that we are lost and to jettison the false security of believing the vast tapestry of lies promulgated by the captains of the American-led Titanic.
I often think of the words of the poet Rilke as good advice, a step in the right direction where there is a lost and found worth visiting and insights await us. While primarily writing about the artist who time and again is that someone who emerges from the crowd and whose “winged heart everywhere beats against the walls of their time,” I think his words apply to every person, including journalists.
To plumb the depths of our sordid current world demands aesthetic, political, and spiritual resistance rooted in the open sociological imagination, a willingness to go wherever the facts and intuition leads us. Rilke said:
Not any self-control or self-limitation for the sake of specific ends, but rather a carefree letting go of oneself; not caution, but rather a wise blindness; not working to acquire silent, slowly increasing possessions, but rather a continuous squandering of all perishable values. This way of being has something naïve and instinctive about it, and resembles that period of the unconscious best characterized by a joyous confidence, namely the period of childhood …. [the child] has no anxiety about losing things …. And whatever he has once been lit up in love remains as an image, never more to be lost, and the image is possession; that is why children are so rich.
For a country of lost children, this is a good place to start.
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“They carry cell phones as sidearms to defend themselves from reality.”
Good line.
Speaking of firearms, I am starting to think that if one had to own only a single firearm, a simple Ruger 10/22 isn’t too bad a choice.
It’s better than throwing rocks.
The take-down model is my recommendation if only one is the limit.
Get the factory trigger kit.
It reduces trigger weight and improves accuracy, and is only around 70 bucks.
“He was well acquainted with nothing (the not, nada) and knew that social circumstances only add to it … “
Abigail suggests reading the classics. That’s good. The ever-present present is just as classical, tho. And the people around you are living embodiments of Grecian Urn odes & other classical statuary.
Read it? Not enough. The trick of wholesale literacy is like this:
“Far out, a polar bear danced across the silvered horizon, blessedly too distant for us to hunt. A mirage took her instead of a bullet. An illusory band of geography made of white light & mirrored light floated up from the ice floor & enveloped the bear: her dancing legs turned into waves of spring heat still trying to make its way here.” ~ This Cold Heaven, Gretel Ehrlich
Comprehension is reading.
Reading’s “fundamentality” is its effectiveness in murdering comprehension even as the deed is miraged in illusory bands of geography.
…“social circumstances only add to it … “ because the not, nada, nothing – the anti(is)social.
“In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter long ago …”
The Peaky Blinder bunch, WW1 vetted (lied to children … “like today”) & vatted ~ traumatized ~ veterans recited this poem when theirs were killed in (later) actions. The pup-tagonist back from that same war, in Boardwalk Empire, just before he was shot in the face, told the shooter that he’d already died in the trench, over there.
Heming-any-way (all words are abstract) … war epitomizes human social circumstances. Too social, it gets slapped with the anti prefix. For appearances. For implausible deniability. Illusory bands of geography mirages made real by headcount alchemy.
Nair takes the hair off, narrative scoops it out of the drain & glues it right back on.
“It is an old trick.”
Yep.
“It is unique.”
Nope.
Hobbes id’d “the war of all against all.” He did not prescribe it away. That can’t be done.
Rule-proving exceptions are just that & only that. What miragers want to see, & so what they project, does not make manifest the geography they describe. And so mirage takes them, or holds them in supercallifragilistic…stasis , until bullets, or syringes, or … take them.
The mirage sidearm against reality is reality for most. The t/ether stretches all the way back. Only Barnes can kill Barnes – or leave the barn where all animals are, but some are more.
Melville. Def Classique. Ahead of his time. And this time, too.
Not all childhoods are as Rilke described. Just too many. That’s a significant part of the set-up … pandering to that bio-substrate is the rest.
“The ever-present present is just as classical, tho. And the people around you are living embodiments of Grecian Urn odes & other classical statuary.”
Yes, agree. There is nothing new under the sun, really. The details change, but the cycles are the same.
I read this last night from Anna Karenina, published in 1875.
“And so liberalism had become a habit of Stepan Arkadyevitch’s, and he liked his newspaper [or social media], as he did his cigar after dinner, for the slight fog it diffused in his brain. He read the leading article, in which it was maintained that it was quite senseless in our day to raise an outcry that radicalism was threatening to swallow up all conservative elements, and that the government ought to take measures to crush the revolutionary hydra; that, on the contrary, “in our opinion the danger lies not in that fantastic revolutionary hydra, but in the obstinacy of traditionalism clogging progress,” etc., etc.”
Russia. 1875. And I thought, “there really isn’t anything new under the sun.” It’s the same old story over & over again…just with different details as time moves forward.
I’m Walkin’ to NO(new orleans)where ~ Fats Domino
The fat bulge +/- however many standard/ised deviations (I don’t think just two covers it). The dominoes as in Vietnam theories & V’s Vendetta script … & all the combinations of keys (& how they are played) on a/gg/rand/ize piano.
And is it the “terrible twos&threes” when kids begin to know NO? Dunno when most forget it, but they do.
“Reactionary.” Saying & being-reacting NO to trespass.
“Insurgents.” Indigenes who NObject to being conquered.
Immature kid stuff, I guess. A developmental phase enroute to full-blown “fully developed & ‘self’ actualized” domestication.
In the wordchangers bulk bins these fiat terms are pejorative, & sell all day long. And at interest, of course.
Words are sold for conjured dollars, other leverage, & “change” is made for the customers who are actually … the products … & the collateral … & the “money” (labor, productivity, cannonfodder).
Or some products of previous transactions refuse to buy anew & insist on keeping the old “change” already in pocket.
“It’s a republic, not a democracy.”
“If you can keep it.”
Who gave “that” to “you?”
How did the giver/s give it & how did the receiver/s receive it?
WhoTF did all parties involved believe themselves, & each other, to be?
Words. The “right” ones & abracadabra, good feels.
Here’s the pic, receiver & received, that puts the words ~ childish things ~ away:
Torben had said: “When the hunters are out on the ice they don’t stop to think. They act directly.”
Cheese (but add popcorn & call it crunchy lemonade … maybe flash too on the tommycruise misslemindedness re his career … but don’t forget to salt that crunchy lemonade with a most important ingredient – luck): “Too many mind” ::
Diversity is our strength?
How about wordiversity is our strength?
What’s the diversity of fireswords out there?
John Fogarty: Thought I heard a rumblin’, Callin’ to my name, Two hundred million guns are loaded, Satan cries, “Take aim!”
((Over on the mountain, Thunder magic spoke, “Let the people know my wisdom, Fill the land with smoke.”))
Ironicomedy how tools “turn” (seemingly) so many weilders, or would-be weilders, into tools. The regulators, incl the “well reg’d militia,” done been captured, eh? Fireblade grass, meet the mower in the mirror.
“I’m literate, I’m gunned up, I fly the Gadsden … I’m over-qualified to say don’t tread on me!”
Then, from wide angle, you zoom in. Speaker’s name is “Tread” & he’s nailed & glued to a boot … imprinting a human face … forever.
But two hundred million. A little glue & few nails can be overcome, & deserts of bloody red & sticky feet can be bloomed green, on that kind of volume, eh?
Tragedy “&” Hope.
“…free from the accepted clichés, slogans & self-justifications … free their understanding of history from the accepted categories & cognitive classifications of the society in which we live, since these, however necessary they may be for our processes of thought & for the concepts & symbols needed for us to communicate about reality, nevertheless do often serve as barriers which shield us from recognition of the underlying realites themselves. The present work is the result of such an attempt to look at the real situations which lie bebeath the conceptual & verbal symbols.”
In reflection of such a Preface, despite sideways presentation (which I think just adds, ya’ know?☻) how many faceplants, how many facesaves? How many minds knowledge of the no? The k/no/wledge, way up there, & the attendant surefootedness it takes to traverse?
”As Dirmann was using wordplay to make it appear as though there was no evidence against poor Mexican Avila …” the David Cole ember this morning:
Gonna have to read these a few times, i forget. 🙂
Goes to faces, names, words “change.”
And to the dynamic doesn’t.
Your example, the example pile.
Take care of the tools & they’ll take care of you … do it not & they’ll *really* take care of you.
“Care” def includes having fun …
“Cluttered minds, cluttered abodes”
So we had a garage sale on Saturday. I didn’t want to, but our kids were so eager to earn some money that they arm twisted me into it. After approximately 10-15 hours of searching the house for sellable junk, hauling everything out front, pricing it and then sitting in the sun for 4 hours while we were our own best customers of our lemonade stand, we earned a grand total of $120, which the children got to divide evenly for themselves to keep. Even though you can’t tell that anything is missing from our cluttered abode, the knowledge that we got rid of what looked like a half a ton of Chinese made plastic – priceless!
“we earned a grand total of $120”
I’ll bet you spent $1200 acquiring the stuff.
The Navajo have a principle of ‘Walking in Beauty’.
Culture develops an opportunity to be able to be at peace with oneself and the rest of the world. Any culture the US had died with the Civil War, being a predator nation is not a culture. The whole idea of bringing ‘democracy to the world’ has got to be the biggest lie ever conceived, after satan at the Tree of Knowledge Of Good and Evil. Then that lie spawned the lies of ‘fighting them over there so not to have to fight them here’ and ‘thank you for your service’.
The lack of culture has introduced this ‘lostness’ written about, basically a feeling of being unimportant or without purpose, and basically that is derived from being self-centered, a lack of understanding that there is a path outside of your control, and that is what scares people.
Taoism is about harmony with the world, the exact same as Walking in Beauty.
By the way America’s path continues to unravel if this is true.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/reports-us-embassy-being-evacuated-baghdads-green-zone-breached
“Walking in Beauty … Taoism is about harmony with the world”
what about walking in harmony with the creator of the world?
That normally comes after first realizing that one can be in harmony with the creation.
Romans 1:20 NIV
‘ For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.’
People seem to act that they are the center of this universe and as an individual are all that matter. They do not realize their very next breath is actually provided for them.
if you think war is bad, try losing a war.
https://www.yourdictionary.com/obscurant & More
I once was lost but now I’m found…