The Goodies generate The Weasels.
Good behavior provokes Bad.
Prohibition: stimulus package
for boot leggings & so it goes:
best of human intentions not
with standing “without
contraries is no
Progress.”

There’s a GAP between what I know,
am aware of – luxury in which I live,
for example and have been raised. on
the one hand, and the misery heard
round the whirl, massive men leading
lives of quite desperate desperation. .

Ongoing disgruntlement: dissatisfied,
uneasy: full of vague desire & arbitrarily
assigned direct objects, sitting and
ruminating to come to terms with
ongoing dissatisfaction & spinach
when I know there are starving
children in India & China & Africa,
soldiers dying in the middle east, hard
times on farm & bayou and how come
(I’m just asking) there is a gap, gape,
chasm, chaos between what I know &
how I feel & a lack of correlation between
the sufficient and the sustainable? Having
it and not having IT?

Just describing here.
Not a condemnation.
Wonder full is all.
Awesome the stunning
disconnect between affect
& intellect. I turn it up so
the two don’t conflate,
collapse & confuse or
I’ll never know how
it is they relate.

Why doesn’t what I know effect affect so
that I feel comfortable in my own skin
when I re-mind myself about 3rd world
countries, the stoning of fenale adulterers
and folks worse off make me feel grateful for
what I have and chip away at least on some
thing like self-absorbed worry, anxiety,
envy, resentment, yearning for I know
not what so as to make me feel better
about myself and my self steam. .

Jog
Lift weights.
Practice Yoga.
Journaling
Watch what I eat
Binge and purge.
Cut myself. Keep up
with foreign affairs. Help
someone worse off Manage
time management better. Get
proper diagnosis & prescription
drugs for restless legs, attention
deficiency & multi-tasking hyper
activity: Ways of Knowing that aim
to effect, regulate, govern Ways of Feeling. .

Sampling: Mel Gibson and Tiger Woods and
John Edwards and Larry King and Mark Sanford
and Jesse James are models for me, inspiring me
to wonder with uncanny appreciation about the
gap between Knowing (of which I have much
invested) and Feeling (of which I have no control)
and I am stunned by the lack of correlation between
being Loaded and Successful, the world on a string
sitting on a rainbow and yet can’t get no satisfaction
no no no so as to be wooking a wub in
alla wong paces.

“The heart has reasons that reasons know not.”
An old conundrum, riddle, perplexity, Gordian
Naught, double bind, Chinese finger trap, rock
& hard place, devil and deep blue see.

How I feel on the one hand.
What I know on the other.
And why can’t they
just get along?

What good is knowing better if don’t make
feeling feel better seeing as feeling good is
what counts, damnit – not much good can
be said for not feeling good & any one can
listen to radio songs and learn that free. .

I want to know why.

Manners of speaking, so to speak. And the more the better if
not always the merrier. We fight over our Ways of Speaking, yes?
Map wars. Representational territorial pissings.

BE scolds me for not making my self clear–as if clarity were
a virtue when we all know how reductive it is. My students
remind me: it’s not black & white, Sam (But of course it IS)
It’s always grades of gray (But of course, that too)

Bad behavior? Our clarity addiction. Or logic & rationality dependence
and habit–in a whirl that transcends human explanation and
reasons why thank you very much.

Never the less.

You say tomato. I say tomahato.
Some one else says love apples.
And poisonous.

Bad behavior all around: human, all too human.
It’s the GOODIES that generate it, true?.
.

King James Bible was translated from scrolls written in 1688BC or thereabouts. The story in the 1688BC scrolls has nothing to do with a black man. It is the emerging of the black fertile highland that was humiliated (Canaan) under the violent waters of creation. This black soil emerged in the Expansion (Japeth) of a Hot (Ham) House for the resting (Noah)place of the conspicous position (name) of the black soil. The place where the Curse was Reversed (Mt. Ararat).

The Warmth of Mating was sent out(Dove) to see if there was yet any resting place for the seed coming across (hebrews) in the waters of creation. Was the black fertile soil ready to bring forth life.

There was no destruction of human in that flood of Rest(Noah).

Now I ask you has the world been behaving badly?
Why has the world behaved badly?
Where is the source of that bad behavior?
When will WE stop passing Hearing(Simeon) Attached(Levi) to a bad report?

Bright
Just Another Cherokee Red Heifer

Anthropologically, Gregory Bateson claims magic and superstition is
a corruption of religion–not the other way around as some argue.

The distinction is worth play.

In Angels Fear: Toward an Episemology of the Sacred, Bateson describes
the (stereotypical?) ritual of the Rain Dance by western native Americans.

To the degee that the dance intends to put the dancers and community
in tune with the whole (often called “nature” or, say, Great Spirit)
then it can be described as RELIGIOUS.

And maybe “good” behavior.

To the degree that the dance as some instrumentally purposive aim to
rain-down-on-us-&-grow-our-crops, then Bateson wouild characterize
the dance as magic, superstision–and “bad” behavior as far as getting
in tune with the Whole and Holy might be concerned. (“religion”:)

Interesting distinction between behavior aimed at coming into accord
with a WHOLE, and behavior aimed at gaining it’s own aims
purpose and terms of desire. (“magic.” “superstition”)

Good behavior/Bad bahavior,
Good dog/Bad dog. :

It’s a part and parts to WHOLE problem (the difference & the relationship.)

In either case, groups and their leaders eventually settle on decisions that are most in agreement (or less dissonant) with their evolving belief systems. As “enlightened” people, we tend to minimize the extent to which our ancestors were similar to other “primitive” groups. The Abrahamic tribes believed strongly in sacrificial offerings to appease the gods. The fact that they believed in multiple gods is attested to by the first of the ten commandments: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” One can certainly find much evidence of magical and superstitious beliefs in our own society (whether of specifically religious origin or not). The elevated place of books like the Bible, the Torah, the Quran, or the Bhagavad Gita is due to the collective and cumulative respect people ascribe to them. They are cultural records or archives of prevalent myths and “holy” writings and stories which the culture has “canonized.” I agree with those who have observed that all theological and philosophical propositions and truths are constructs of human thought, analysis, or in some cases ecstatic inspiration.

Such constructs can be religious, nationalistic, manic (fear-driven), ecstatic/hedonistic, or combinations of these and other motivating factors. Our nature is that we are susceptible to any and all (and more) such qualities of experience and aspiration. Uprisings and undertakings of all sorts are typified more by their profligate and infinite variability than any possible similarity of ideology or even intensity of feelings. And yet “there is nothing new under the sun” an ancient proverb tells us. The latter statement, found as it is in scripture, is an excellent example of a proposition or “truism” that is simultaneously true (perhaps on several different levels) and false, depending on one’s own frame of reference. The inherent complexities of human thought and feelings are so intricate and so vast in their scope that they essentially defy categorical classification and clarity of understanding. Perhaps that is why there are so many, and yet so few, holy books.

I choose not to be religious, but claim no greater moral or ethical virtues than religious people. Hitchens can’t seem to accept the duality of human behavior — both as individuals and as collectives. Religions are what their adherents make of them.

During the early 1970s I lived for a year in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, as it was known then. From that year, I have four stories to report:

1. We befriended a Muslim who had received his doctorate in linguistics from the University of Michigan before returning to his home city. Needless to say, he was fluent in English. We went for a walk with him outside of Sarajevo, and came upon a wood hut. I said to him, “This might have been where Joseph and Mary went.” He replied, “Joseph and Mary who?”

2. This same fellow told us that, as far as he was concerned, religion was the worst thing that happened to what would become Yugoslavia; it was responsible for much of the hostility between the Yugoslav peoples. (Long afterwards, in the 1990s, we this hostility rise again and play itself out once again.)

3. A woman whose father had been the leader of the Serbian Orthodox community in Sarajevo told me that “religion isn’t important nowadays.” I could see this documented every day in the death notices which appeared in the daily papers. Most of them were accompanied by (communist) stars, rather than by religious symbols, although the latter were seen every once in a while, too.

4. A woman told me in joking fashion that “nowadays, we don’t say ‘Thank God’; we say “Thank Marx.”

Excellent Cartography of the Flat World.

Anti-Religionists (not that there’s anything wrong with that: turn it up; put it in play)
such asChristopher Hitchens et al are like kids who figure out there’s no Santa Clause.

Pissed. As if duped, damnit–and now full of righteous anger at the pervasive myth
hulking over the species like some sphinx, Smart, too–brilliant, rational, logical
like reducing some dream to common sense. Like going into the closet with a
flashlight& lucid schemes to expose darkness.

“Who’s afraid of the dark?
Do you see any round here?

Like a Freddy Flatlander lecturin on Sally Sphere in terms of circles and circle jerks
Eureka.

LIKE, I said. Loose analogic. Don’t expect logic from me on these matters.

Many pissed off at the disturbance getting sucked in to the controversy.

And then some just listening, delighting in Christopher Robbin,
holy smokes & mirrors, they say, with unpostponed joy.
Far Out. .