You forgot to answer

I’m jumping ahead to the next chapter (Jung) a little here but I can’t resist the temptation. My English degree MA was really more a degree in creative writing - poetry/archetype theory. Archetype theory is Jungian Psychology applied to the study of literature. Most of us in the program were studying literature in the same sense that conservatory students study music by learning to play one particular instrument. According to archetype theory, artistic creativity is a form of lucid dreaming where the manifest content of the dream is the life you live and the latent content is created by the way certain objects and events along the way are charged, as if with a capital offense, as triggers or keys which unleash or unlock an energy that is transpersonal rather than personal. These energies are not in us so much as we are in them. Jung understood sexuality much better than Freud. I’ll stop now. Anyway”””””. I went up to my eyeballs in this stuff when I was too young to know better and the result was:

You forgot to Answer

It's really better that you don't answer. That way I can continue making you up to order as someone I could love with a passion as pure and hot as a blue flame. Only the past or the future, only the lost cause or the desperate hope, ever burns that brightly. Perfection is seen but never touched. The here and now, the bird in hand, is never the bird that will lift you to heaven. You are sleeping and I am sitting by your bedside reading the same story you are dreaming in a book written many years ago by a wild man who lived in the woods with birds nesting in his hair and a bitter aching absence of remembered perfume haunting his nostrils forever more. "When I remember what to say" the wild man's book begins "you will turn and return to your senses, turn to find me standing in your shadow, chanting your true name like a ring around your finger". "You are dreaming a dream that isn't about what happens in the dream" it continues "but about what the dream is struggling not to say. Somewhere below the surface of the dream, in a darkness as rich and deep as chocolate or the exhaustion after spent desire, a blind fish opens her mouth and a blood curdling silence comes out. This silence fills the space were the name would go if you were to name your own desire, the space at the center of the story where the "why" sits making all that "what", "when" and "how" fit together to make a story about something real, about something important to someone. I am leaving now and the closing of the door behind me is one more tooth falling out of the head you dream with, out of the comb you pull through your hair, out of the night that goes on forever once you shut a final door." 

Timothy Leary, Father of the Acid Trip

It is impossible to define the meaning and nature of a drug experience by looking strictly at the chemical ingested. Mindset, setting, and sociological context variables determine the drug experience as a subjective experience capable of reaffirming or transforming one’s conception of self and one’s relationship to a whole cluster of emotionally laden symbols (Zinberg, 1984). Years ago, I wrote a research paper titled Who Was the True Father of LSD? for a graduate course in psychedelic research taught by Dr. Thomas B. Roberts in the Educational Psychology department of Northern Illinois University. Albert Hofmann first synthesized the chemical in 1938 and certainly meant to claim paternity when he published a book titled LSD, My Problem Child (Hofmann, 1980). Bicycle Day is still celebrated on April 19^th to commemorate the day in 1943 when Hofmann accidentally dosed himself with LSD and became the first person to experience the peculiar psychoactive properties of the drug he synthesized in search of a non-addictive painkiller. Many people consider this the first acid trip but I disagreed in my paper. My counterclaim was that accidental ingestion of the chemical alone would not have made it possible to trip before Humphrey Osmond’s 1956 introduction of the concept of a psychedelic or mind-manifesting drug or before the work of Aldous Huxley made the metaphor of a drug-induced trip into inner space commonly available for further articulation.

I credited Timothy Leary as the true father of the acid trip as it came to be understood in the context of 1960s counterculture. Hofmann synthesized a drug. Leary created the mindset and setting that made that drug the core sacrament of something that served the function of a religion in millions of lives and, for better or worse, changed the minds of many of those millions as dramatically as the mind of Saul of Tarsus was changed long ago on the road to Damascus. Leary’s work was a bricolage of the previous work of many others, but the final synthesis was distinctively enough his own to earn him a place in history as the man who invented the acid trip.

References

Hofmann, A. (1980). LSD, my problem child. Columbus: McGraw-Hill.

Metzner, R. (1989). Molecular mysticism: The role of psychoactive substances in the transformation of consciousness. In C. Ratsch (Ed.), Gateway to inner space. London: Prism Press.

Rosegrant, J. (1976). The impact of set and setting on religious experience in nature. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 15, 301–310.

Zinberg, N. (1984). Drug, set, and setting. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Astrology

I love comments about astrology like, “I don’t believe in astrology. I am a Virgo and we are very skeptical.” A good friend of mine once told me that he did not believe in astrology but had made it a point to move all the way across the classroom from a redhead he had sat down next to the first day of class because he thought she was cute. They made a little small talk before the lecture started and he jokingly asked her if she happened to be a Scorpio. It turned out she was, just like a former girl-friend, also a redhead and former for easily five years at the time this was happening, who he would swear after consuming his second Mike’s Hard Lemonade of the evening had emotionally scarred him for life. 

He knew better but still could not make himself not feel better avoiding her after he knew; the fear was still real for him as emotion even though he knew that it was irrational and was a little ashamed to let it determine his behavior. This kind of story, and they are not rare, explains to me why astrology has survived well past the time when the world view that originally generated and supported it has passed away. There was still a chair in Astrology at the Sorbonne the year Shakespeare was born. Jung wrote a book about Astrology that examined it seriously as a theory of personality. The book presented what Jung accepted as hard evidence that astrological sign correlated significantly with several other measures of personality type or temperament.

The problem with astrology and fortune telling is that the descriptions of personality offered are so broad and so general that no prediction specific enough to test can be derived from those descriptions. This means that the description offered cannot be proven wrong. In order to be a scientific theory, a description or broad explanation must generate very specific particular predictions that can be tested and proven wrong. If such specific predictions are proven false, the broader description or explanation is also falsified.  If my horoscope said “You will met a woman on Tuesday named after a flower. She will be into macramé and lack the big toe on her left foot in consequence of a riding mower accident suffered when she was eleven.”, that would be empirically testable. Horoscope readings tend to be more like “Tuesday is promising for romance. Be careful with your cash in the afternoon.” If I have a nice conversation with a redhead named Sandy in the produce section of Winn-Dixie while doing my grocery shopping on Tuesday, I may call that vague prediction fulfilled. 

I will not change my mind later when Sandy and I never see each other again but will forget the whole episode, just as I will have forgotten the part about being careful with cash by Wednesday if nothing coincidental occurs to bring it to mind. Horoscope readings prime us to look for things that could be read as confirmations of their vague predictions. We remember the predictions that we can see as being fulfilled by some coincidence and forget the other five equally broad predictions made in the same reading.

Big Banks Get Tax Break On Foreclosure Abuse Deal

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/17/foreclosure-settlement-tax-break_n_2497827.html

In Iceland, the bankers responsible for the financial melt-down there went to prison. This did a great deal to restore faith in the integrity of the system. Not sending bankers to prison for white-collar crimes that destroy the lives of real people is the best possible way to make sure that both the bankers involved and their colleagues and the people whose lives they destroyed and other ordinary citizens like them understand that America is run by a wall street mafia as much as Sicily was run by the Sicilian mafia in the worst of the bad old days. Even in a country where voter suppression is openly practiced and prideful admitted, even in a country where gerrymandered districts give a Republican Party that received a minority of the votes in house races nationwide more seats (233) than the party that received the majority of votes (201), many, many more of the people who actually cast ballots are victims of white-collar crime or their loved ones than are white-collar criminals. Why would Jews vote for Nazis? Why would slaves vote against their own emancipation? Why is there a single Republican left serving in office anywhere in America?

Blogging is a Moral Obligation

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said, “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” It was in DeKalb, Illinois sometime in 1986 that I first discovered The War that Hitler Won by Robert E. Herzstein. I was in graduate school at Northern Illinois University at the time and taking The Rhetoric of Social Movements in the Communication Studies Department with Dr. Lois Self. My final paper for the course embraced the two ideas that were central to the book. The first was that Hitler, with indispensible help from his Minister of Popular enlightenment, Joseph Paul Goebbels, conquered Germany and had a huge advantage over his adversaries in the Second World War Because Goebbels was the first person to master in practice a style of governance based on using mass media to shape and manage public opinion with enough subtlety and skill to justify speaking of the result as Manufactured Consent in exactly Noam Chomsky’s sense of that phrase. The second and more controversial idea set forth by Herzstein was that Nazi Germany was the first modern state. This assertion was based on the claim that every modern state was based on the process of manufacturing consent central to Nazi practice. It was in this sense that Hitler won the war; the governments of the world are not all fascist now, but they are all based on the manufacture of consent.

Mikhail Bakhtin wrote of centripetal and centrifugal forces that shaped society. The new forces that emerged from about 1900 to 1950 (radio, TV, Film) were all centripetal; they strengthened the center at the expense of the edge and tended to homogenize individuals and sub-cultures into a mass audience. Communication was one way between a source of information and a passive receiver of information. The Internet and its related technologies are centrifugal. Each node is, at the same time, a transmitter, a receiver, a re-packager and a connection between nodes. This centrifugal process creates communities based on narrow-casting that could not exist otherwise; each of these is in turn a venue for the performance and rehearsal of new identities that may transfer to the flesh-world if they prove satisfying. The most fascinating of those communities are created through a process of gerrymandering which puts people together based on a single shared interest that would previously have never interacted or influenced each other at all. I first started writing about these issues back 20 years ago and the fascination still persists:

If Architecture Is Politics What are the Politics of the Internet: A Bakhtinian View

St. Louis, Missouri, 10/21–10/24 1993, Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America.

Blogging is a moral obligation. The mere act of uttering\outering\othering the truth of one’s own subjectivity is perhaps the most subversive of all methods of speaking truth to power. The “real world” of manufactured consent is always a reduction and an abstraction that so fails to do justice to any one individual life as to finally be an instrument of repressive violence against individual existence per se. The most subversive of all methods of speaking truth to power is the simple refusal to be disappeared from a “real world” which is not the place anyone actually lives; every subjectivity that is powerfully uttered/outered/othered provides a contrast that make the “real world” false by comparison.