Friday, September 19, 2008

The Other Player

I feel great. Last night, after feeling like I was getting nothing out of History of Magic, I set it aside and went back to Colin Wilson's old trust The Occult, which I had never finished, picking up right where I had left my bookmark, (by a description of the Tunguska incident). Later, in the middle of a section trying to explain a theory about the nature of precognition, I set the book down and sat at my computer. I booted up Word, and just sat there for a moment, clearing my mind and letting the story that I had been thinking about form into place. When it was there, when I knew what must happen, I began to write. I kept writing, until I was too tired to keep going. So I went to sleep. And when I woke up, I sat right down and started writing, and didn't stop until I finished the story. Now it is done, and printed off, and I am sitting here enjoying a glass of 1554 Enlightened Black Ale, and feeling good.

I won't read the story yet. I am going to sit on that a bit, and get a bit of a critical perspective on it, before I tackle the task of making changes. But right now it is good to know that I got to the end, and loved doing it.

It was easy. It was also hard, but it was easy. It was like, I realized that the point was not to worry about the words, but so "see" the story, to know it, and just let it flow out of you, onto the page. I knew what came next, because that is what had to come next. It was a wonderful feeling, akin to the descriptions of out-of-body experiences I had just been reading about. There was something truly occult about it. For a time, I felt that I had tapped into forces...not beyond me, but deeper inside me. Every so often, a part of me would correct something, reach in and say that was the wrong word, but for the most part he was just standing by, that editor of me, and let the other me take over the task. Like when I am playing the drums, and feel totally at peace with every beat and bang and clash that I make, and voice is yelling from somewhere, "isn't this wonderful?!" But it is my voice, and I am reveling from a distant, the person who is playing.

Thursday, September 18, 2008

More Seeds

Getting a comment from the famous Neil Sinhababu on this post reminded me of something. War or Car, which is Neil's awesome website about the cost of the Iraq War, which I totally forgot to ever link to, and which I totally don't read regularly, thought I really should. It's way more awesome than the Palin Truth Squad site, because it has tons of awesome factoids, and yet is ultimately really, really depressing. (I personally, would much rather have me free car than a war.) It's amazing how many ridiculous things we could have done with that money. In fact, such factoids always kind of make me wish we could just pick some fundamentally awesome thing to spend 3 trillion dollars on that wasn't a war, just for the hell of it. I think it might be the one where I get a car, but I haven't read the sight in a while, so that might not be the case anymore.

So, I am adding a link to it in my very barebones links page, so I keep coming back to it. And you should too.

Who Watches the Watchers?

Though I have been reading The History of Magic for a around a week now, I have only gotten to page 168, and that's after starting in page 55, skipping Waite's preface and Lévi's introduction. (the last time I tried to read those they had scared me off the book, so I just wanted to skip to the good stuff.) The reason it's been taking me so long is that I keep getting distracted. Since starting it I have taken pages and pages of notes and ideas, trying to draw connections between ideas I am reading now and have read or had before. Also, Lévi's writing is very allusive, and often refers to ideas of concepts I am not really familiar with, and often I find myself getting lost in Wikipedia trying to catch up, or trying to get an idea about something else just because I have been thinking about it. The text has really sent my brain off in a bunch of different directions. Last night, I broke my vow of not reading other stuff and read started reading the bible. I got up through all the stuff concerning Abraham and Isaac, stopping before it started into Jacob (that's about half of Genesis). It's very hard to read a book grounded in a Judeo-Christian worldview without having read that stuff!* While most of it I knew, I had no idea how all those stories fit together. I didn't know, for example, the relation between Lot and Abraham, or that they were contemporaries.

One section that I found very interesting was a little blurb about beings coming down from heaven to mate with mortal women and creating giants.

...Okay, I just got back from a little breather, because what I am going to launch into is quite complex, and textual. It concerns a topic which has been bothering me ever since I started reading Lévi: the formation of early religious pantheons.

Here is the text beings mating from my dad's old bible, Genesis 6:1-4, translated by Theophile J. Meek.** This is right before the story of the Flood:
Presently when men began to grow numerous over the earth, and had daughters born to them, the sons of the gods noticed that the daughter of men were attractive; so they married those whom they liked best. Then the LORD said,

"My spirit must not remain in man forever, inasmuch as he is flesh. Accordingly, his lifetime shall be one hundred twenty years."

In those days, as well as afterward, there were giants on the earth, who were born to the sons of the gods whenever they had intercourse with the daughters of men; these were the heroes who were men of note in days of old.
Pretty odd, huh? "Sons of the gods?" What's that doing in a the bible? It seemed like a clear example of some earlier version of the story getting left in the text and not edited out. In fact the entire section seems out of place stuck as it is between the ancestry list from Seth to Noah and the story of the flood. It has a lot of tropes in it that pop up in other religions, the existence of Giants before the flood, the existence of heroes who are the descendants of gods (Although usually the giants are separate from the heroes and the heroes live after the Deluge, not before it.) Then there was the fact that this passage is basically the same story that concerns the apocryphal Book of Enoch, which Lévi discusses in chapter one of The History of Magic: Basically, rogue angels leave heaven and mate with human women and then teach them the secrets of magic and technology. This corrupts men, and Gods casts those angels out of heaven and causes the flood to get rid of these pernicious influences. It seems to basically be a more fleshed out version of this story.

But who are these beings, then? Are they son's of gods? Sons of God? Angels? What's the deal with this story. So, I checked Wikipedia.

Now, according to the the section on the Book of Enoch, the beings that come down from heaven are the Watchers, or Grigori, angels "dispatched to earth simply to watch over people." The beings they father are called the Nephilim. This title is also accorded to them in some translations of the section from Genesis. The section on the Nephilim quotes this version of the same passage, from the New American Standard Bible:
Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose. Then the Lord said, "My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years." The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.
Here we have sons of God and Nephilim being the two groups being mentioned, instead of "the sons of the gods" and giants. Obviusly Nephilim is the actual word coming from the bible, and giants is just an equivalence, the same describing the Jotun of norse myth as giants. Wikipedia actually has a page on the phrase "sons of God," which outlines some theories about what the phrase means, but also includes the detail that is is a translation of "b'nei elohim." Elohim might mean Children of El, who was the chief god of the Canaanite pantheon, and possibly is the source of the Judaic god. So this phrase means something like "the sons of the children of El." Elohim is also a term used only for God, which seems like a plural form meaning "The gods" that has been grandfathered in to mean only the one God, as if the one God is legion, or something. I think this explains why Meek translated the phrase as "sons of the gods," then.

Now, what's furtherly interesting, to me at least, is that in Canaanite mythology, El has many sons and children including Ba'al Hadad, Yam, and Mot, gods of storm, sea, and death, thus corresponding to Zeus, Poseidan and Hades, making El correspond to Cronus. And of course Ba'al, which means lord, pops up all over the bible as a false god. So it seems as if El is the future god of the Old Testament, and all these signs of the past religion litter the history of the Bible. And what seems especially ironic is, there seems to have been some type of war between Ba'al Hadad and his father, just like with Zeus and his father Cronus, but this time, the father won, not the son.

So were the sons of god in the original story the sons of El, Hadad and Yam and Mot? Or were the they fallen angels? In the book of Enoch, they are given names, none of them the names of Canaanite gods. The leader is Samyaza, whose name means "infamous rebellion" and might just be another name for Satan, and includes among their number Azazel, who is a pretty famous demon. Are the Watchers the first version of the story of the fallen angels, or are they another group of fallen angels? Are the watchers supposed to be the others gods in El's pantheon, who have been kicked out. What is going on here?

Who are the Watchers?

*In fact, one of the things that I have contention with in Lévi is his insistence on viewing occult phenomena from such a perspective. I mean, for argument's sake, a lot of the stories relating to evil, satanic spirits may simply be stories formerly involving pagan spirits. Those devils that aid St. Chaldean when he's a magician might have simply been tutelary gods, or nature spirits. I find it odd to talk about magic while leaving out all mention of the Celtic and Nordic mythic systems. Druids seem to me like they would be a pretty large portion of the occult, yet Levi doesn't really deal with how they relate to his system.

**That's one hell of a Christian name, no?

A History of Magic

So lately I have been feeling like I need to commit myself more firmly to reading and finishing books. So I have taken upon myself the slightly off-kilter choice of reading The History of Magic by Eliphas Lévi, translated into English and with footnotes by A.E. Waite (yep, as in the famous Rider-Waite Tarot Deck, that guy). What with all this talk about the death of David Foster Wallace, I have had to resist the urge to go out and read some of his stuff, or at least make another attempt at Pynchon's behemoth Against the Day. But it's okay. My will is good.

Lévi is really an Frenchman named Alphonse Louis Constant, writing in the mid-nineteenth century. He writing style bears a lot of the stylistic tics I associate with that period by way of Marx: a circumlocutory style that talked around a subject without through line or goal, that manages to encompass its topic without elucidating it, and totally bereft of conclusion, instead relying upon bald, unsubstantiated statement or opinion*. It's really an horrible, horrible approach to approaching a non-fiction topic.

About that non-fiction topic. Lévi believes vampires exist. Vampires, dude. Among other things. There is actually something quite exhilarating about reading an old book that believes thing nobody does today. It's like traveling back in time and finding yourself in a another universe as well. I suppose I could spend all my time trying to debate Lévi's worldview and form one of my own in opposition to it, but at the moment it's enough to simply enter that world and get a taste of it before returning to my own.

More troubling is dealing with Lévi's worldview. It's kind of weird, because one doesn't usually think of magicians in these terms, but Lévi is very "traditional," in a sense. He thinks that hierarchy in knowledge is necessary for a properly functioning society, that it is not possible for the people to all be fully informed, and metaphysical knowledge must be held by a select few. However, this doesn't mean that he thinks all hierarchy is good; he thinks it's easy for it to be corrupted, and has no real suggestions for how to make things function better (at least not yet), beyond believing that those in possession of have the necessary training to use it wisely. Constant was Catholic, and a failed priest, so this view is probably a mixture of the support for the priesthood as a source of divine knowledge and of Transcendental Magic's approach to magical initiation.

Lévi also seems to have a pretty old idea of the roles of the sexes. He talks much about how Goëtic, or Black Magic, is magic used outside the proper priestly initiation and thus most magicians and all witches really are trafficking with the devil. I was kind of expecting some kind of defense of people that had been persecuted as witches throughout history, but no, Lévi seems to really seem to think these are women who don't know their place. He also has a chapter, albeit a short one, devoted to the sacred power of virginity and chastity, and it seems to go without saying that men just be chaste, but women need to be virgins. There is also quite a bit on how evil spirits, incubi and succubi, are drawn to and created by repressed sexual energy and bodily emissions (that's some old-school terminology right there). Basically sexual energy is tied up a lot with bad things and evil and stuff, and there is definitely a gendered component to it all.

I am still trying to figure out what Lévi's basic view of things is, but there is a lot of talk of the Astral Light, which isn't precisely light but seems to be the building block of physical reality, and also the form of spirit (you can definitely see here the building blocks of the connections people draw between magical thinking and quantum theory). This Astral Light, however, is tied to the serpent from the Garden of Eden somehow, and is juxtaposition to some other force, with is the more "divine" force. And the Devil, in the section on him—well, Lévi isn't really clear on what the devil is, precisely, although he seems dismissive of the conception of the devil as an actual figure and seems knowledgeable of the origins of the character of Lucifer Morningstar. But the personage of Lucifer Morningstar is somehow connected to the idea of the Astral Light, the source of it, so the Light seems somehow tied to "evil," as, to a certain degree, magic itself, or Black Magic, which seems to be manipulation of Astral Light in such a way that it corrupts the soul and make it hard to communicate with God, somehow. (I wish he would spell this stuff out clearer, I feel more like I am hunting and pecking for little bits of information from a cloud of verbiage.) This seems to be basically consistent with Lévi's opinions of mediums, which is that they are people whose souls are so tied up in knots that they draws other spirits to them like a whirlpool, and thus should be avoided by the rest of us.

It's weird. Lévi was a magician, yet he seems to have a very low opinion of most magicians, and not in an egotistical sense. I suppose at some later point in the book Lévi will will give a fuller account of Transcendental Magic and how this relates to other occult phenomena; I'm only around halfway through, after all.

*Though the work is translated by Waite, the style seems to carry through the specific level of word choices; it's more a matter of construction than diction. However, it probably exists on the level of word choice as well. Waite's various footnotes, incredibly useful, as they often correct Lévi's errors—and yes it is a bit annoying reading a book knowing you might be getting the wrong information—are much more direct and concise than his translation of Lévi's French, leading me to believe that his diction in translation is more a manner of capturing Lévi's tone than exchanging it for his own.

Planting Seeds, People, Just Planting Seeds.

It appears that over at Cogitamus, Neil's website for the The Palin Truth Squad is moving up the ranks of the Google search, so I thought I would post a link for it, to help it along. I think that does something. That's what a Google Bomb is, right? I am so poor at this.

Anyways, hope this helps.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

RIP, Rick Wright

Rick Wright, keyboardist for Pink Floyd, has died. I am listening to "Great Gig in the Sky" as I type.

I haven't really been listening to Pink Floyd much in recent years, but I was really, really into them in high school. I bought every single one of their studio albums, which is quite a feat, considering I wasn't using drugs. So, this seriously bums me out. He wasn't really prime mover in the band ever, but after Syd got kicked out, he was the bands main space cadet, and was responsible for all the really trippy, childish songs, songs like "Paintbox," "Remember a Day" and "See Saw," that lent the later incarnation of the band some of their earlier vibes. And of course, he wrote "The Great Gig in the Sky," an absolutely superb song about death with no words. Not trippy or childish at all, just eerie and beautiful.

Shine on, Richard Wright. We'll miss you.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Two Things

I did two interesting things today, one that felt really bad, and one that felt really good.

The first was the bad thing. Remember a while back when there was reports about how Walmart was screening videos decrying how, if Obama was elected, the fair pay act would allow unions to run rampant, and this would destroy not only poor little defenseless Wal-Mart, but America? Well, see, I work for "The Other Guy," and today I had to watch a video that was basically the same thing. Following in the standard, "the same as Wal-Mart, but classier" approach, it was just a incredibly distorted video about how unions are bad, and are evil businesses (Yes, businesses!) that ruin life for workers. The only reference to recent events was about "coming changes in our labor laws." So no direct references to the campaign or the candidates, just some anti-union propaganda before the election.

If I understood the the basic argument of the video, it was that unions are not able to make them pay you more, and joining them will break up the big happy corporate family that you belong to that pays you minimum wage. The guy across from me snortled and chuckled throughout at the videos epic failure, and at one point, to afraid to do anything overt, I just looked over, and we shared a look: the kind that says, "yeah, this is bullshit." Another guy and I shared a good laugh afterwards, as well. (Op! Just wanted to make sure there was none of those evil unions around the corner!" he said) My heart goes out to you both.

It made me feel bad. I like the work atmosphere there, but now I am going to trust the managers's there a little less.

The other thing was, after coming home and perusing the blogs to the wave of bullshit that has been rising since the Republinca Convention (and will hopefully soon crest), and just being disgusted and feeling helpless about the whole thing, I got a call out of the blue from the Local Obama campaign, asking if I wanted to volunteer. So I did. I spent two and a half hours today calling phone numbers of college students who didn't answer and talking vaguely about politics with the interns. In a way, it was an edifying esperiance, except I think all I managed to was to knock out some pages of people they would not need to call again.

A couple anecdotes, though, that I bring back to the blog world (Sir Charles, ari, are you reading this?): the PUMAs are very real, and Sarah Palin means something to them. All the interns seemed to have had encounters with women, even pro-choice women, who were voting for McCain-Palin, because they wanted a woman in office. One person was even told that "a vote for McCain is really a vote for Hillary." This was not funny to them. One person spent much time talking with pro-choice women, and trying to discuss things with a McCain supporter. Apparently, they don't like to bring up abortion over the phone (I asked, and then was forced to admit it was all outside my area of expertise), so they focus on McCain not supporting the Fair Pay Act. Many of us noted that we had encounter with enthusiastic 80-year-old Obama fans, of both sexes, and I wondered why it seemed to be more the 60 or 70 age group that was so pro-McCain. One woman opined that it's because that age group wasn't tuaght to be "rebellious" like the slightly younger ones were (read those quote-marks as signifying contempt).

But yeah, Pumas: a very real, and annoying phenomenon, people. The grunts have to deal with it day in and day out.

Friday, September 5, 2008

The Last Gasp of the Right

After reading the first little bit of this John Cole post, something occurred to me, a thought that I had had previously, but entirely forgotten about.

In the Democratic party, the base, the people who constitute the solid source of support and votes, are basically Good Democrats, normal citizens who aren't really all that involved in politics, but know which side their bread is buttered on, and show up to vote for them. Then there is the activist, politically inclined types, who are really into politics, and are always threatening to stay home or vote third party, and really claim to have no real oyalty to the Democratic Party itself (*cough*).

But in the Republican party it's basically the opposite, because the base is the Religious Right. That's where they get their votes, not from libertarians or free-market types. There's a huge chunk of the country that is basically votes on spreading an image Christianity across our apolitical culture. And like the far-left liberals, these people don't really care about the republican party itself, they want to republican party to start doing more of what they want, it doesn't, you know. And like the far-left liberals, they have no problem staying home or voting for a third party. They do not care about the party per se, they just care about what it has done for them lately. And in terms of distance from the American Center, the religious right is really just as extreme, if not more extreme, than more on the liberal left.

This basically explains the difference between the two parties, and their approaches to constituencies. The Democratic Part is always balancing between ignoring the left and doing some things in their favor, for the most part seeing how much they can just ignore them to gain swing voters without losing the election entirely by turning to many of the left away. So, the democrats often seem hesitant to embrace their left. Hence them almost never using the word abortion in ads. The right, on the other hand, can't afford to stick it to their fringe, because their fringe is their base. So that's why you get John McCain bending over backwards to court the religious right, because he automatically has no chance without them. I suspect that if John McCain had his druthers, he would be running the kind of moderate, idea-based campaign that he said he would. But the base hates him; he represents everything that they hate in the republican party, and there is an actual chance that they wouldn't show up to vote for him. So here he is turning himself into their ghoul, to protect their votes.

Personally I suspect that after this election the religious right will be done. Obama's triumph will prove once and for all that they are outside the mainstream, and are lethal to electoral success, and they Republican Party will soon dump them wholecloth, and start running on small-government libertarian and civil libertarians. It will be something like the party of Goldwater again. The Religious Right will go back to not caring about electoral politics, and slowly shrink as the combined forces of modernity and liberalism slowly tear their children out of the fold. These people are simply living in an outdated social model, one that cannot really exist in the first world, and the only reason it has been useful to these people—the sense of community, the social programs and daycare— is in dealing with the hardship caused by the party they have voted for. As those causes disappear, their children will drift away, seeing their parents' culture as not one they need to hold onto for themselves, and not worth preserving for posterity.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Biden II



The transcript from this video has been making the rounds as proof that Joe Biden is going to start putting his foot in his mouth. But having watched it, it has finally cured of any doubts I might have had about Obama's pick. The guy is hilarious! I mean, just insanely good sense of comic timing. Very very likable. And his openness and ease with a crowd....

I think this pick confirms what is fast becoming the iron rule of the campaign: Obama Is Better At This Than You. Anytime someone comes up with some criticism of a decision that the Obama campaign has made, they end up being proved wrong. These guys are just the best in the business. The rest of us, we should just sit back and enjoy the ride.

via.

Monday, September 1, 2008

Dreams

I am in the process of just tearing through Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father. It lacks the formality and diplomacy of The Audacity of Hope, so I think it gives you a better sesne of Obama as a writer.

His writing is a weird mix of master and novice. His descriptive skill is incredibly compact yet extremely vivid. Rarely does he not come up with the exactly the words and details to draw a picture in the minds eye, and when relating events, every phrase builds towards the scenes point. There is an ambiguity to his writing as well. Barack is much more of a shower than a teller. Scenes are often related, and though he often explains the effect some scenes had on him emotionally, like when Auma tells him about the fate of his father, other scenes receive no discussion and analysis. This actually, can often be aggravating. When A black Reverend tells him that his congregation won't work with Barack's organization because they don't want to work with some jews and Catholic churches, and besides the mayors black and he's friends with him, so why work with them now, You kind of want to know what this scene means, what it signifies of Obama, but he doesn't really say anything particular about it, just leaves you to draw your own conclusions.

On the novice front, Barack seems to have some difficulties maitaining the verisimultude of the memoir genre. The long passages of conversation are fine. You can just assume that he is recalling the broad outline of something that was once said, and he renders the character's voice acutely enough that we can buy that even if these are the exact words they said, they were in tis same voice. Besides this is just a nessesary convention to keep such writing interesting. But he has the tendency, expecially in earlier passages (you can feel him improving as the book goes on) on having the speaker state information that both characters know already, like in comic books with two old foes restate their entire origins to each other while fighting. It pulls you out when you know a character wouldn't say something like that. Also, remembrances prompted by other events are other framed as things he is thinking of at the time. I can accept that the conversations are somewhat the product of invention, because i can beleive you know the outline of it, or at least the gist. But expecting me to buy that you remember not your train of thought from several years ago is just asking to much of me, I think. It's a convention of narrative that I just can't buy as realistic.

Also, there is a fragmentary nature to the narrative, which is somewhat reminiscent of Joyce. The chapters, especially the earlier ones, jump over whole points of experience. To a degree, this is ok, since you can fill in a lot of details yourself. But sometimes it just seems fragmentary. Its hard to connect the anrgy, young, semi-militant black man of his first two years of college relates to the young boy growing up. It's kind of hard to figure how someone who relates to Malcolm X can reconcile that with being raised by entirely by white relations. Sometimes, his showing, not telling approach means he stops even showing. This would be eaiser to deal with, I think, if each of the chapters had a more cohesive whole, some kind of conclusion, but they don't They are more like breaks in the narrative. Cliffhangers. And then the narrative jumps ahead, and you are left wondering what the significance of the last chapter was. If he is going to encapsulate one period in his life, then he needs to give the capsule some sense of completelyness. The book lacks any degree of closure or conclusion. In a sense this is a good approach, because he keep reading, hoping for the various threads to come together by the end, but I am kind of doubting that Barack is going to pull this all together at the end, and make all the chapters retroactively fit into a concrete worldview. It's more like he is just offering up his experiances for perusal.

On that front though, the book is pretty devastating. The depiction of race relations in 1980's Chicago is just about the most depressing comment on the subject I have read. its just an endless series of ethnic rivalries, with all sides working against each other, making it impossible for anything to get better. I hope it's not still like that.

Which brings me to another point. This book is obviously not the work of someone who was planning on eventually running for president, or even really any political office. There's just too many details that people wouldn't want on the record, and no politician would want to be caught leaving such harsh depictions race relations. They certainly wouldn't structure an entire chapter around sitting up at 3 a.m. (heh) after a wild party, drunk and stoned and miserable. Or throw in all this cursing, including passages where he calls people motherfuckers. (There is a great novelty to thinking of the Eloquent Hopemonger saying "motherfucker." Is there an audiobook? Read by him? If so, I NEED it.)

And yet the book also makes me more trusting of him, because the image of him that emerges is very, very familiar. Take this passage:

In 1983, I decided to become a community organizer.

There wasn't much detail to the idea; I didn't know anyone making a living that way. When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn't answer them directly. Instead, I'd pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.

That's what I'll do, I'll organize black folks. At the grass roots. For change.
Sound familiar? That's Obama writing in 1995, before he ran for public office, about himself in 1983. He all but says "change from the bottom up." And he knows what he is thinking is slightly nuts; I am pretty sure that last sentence is a bit of self-deprecating irony. But he does it anyways. And now here is that guy, years later, running for the presidency, and he is espousing the exact same things. That's stunning. There is a dreamer running for president.