Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?

 

"I can come to a lesson on Monday" is better English than “I can come to lesson in the Monday”. Even so, I understood what the person I am helping learn English by providing the opportunity to chat with a native speaker on Skype wrote perfectly well. Being understood is close enough for me when I try to communicate in French and closer than I can usually come. Learning French has always been, like playing guitar, just a hobby for me. Maybe that is why, after several decades of playing with French and my guitar and 15 semester hours of college credit in French, the only person who has ever been able to follow my spoken French was a Haitian that I was helping to prepare for the American citizenship exam. He assumed, probably because my accent américain is richly augmented by a southern drawl, that I was trying to speak Creole. Maybe I should check out opportunities for ESL instructors in Haiti.

English is rapidly becoming the second language of the educated world; the language that two people who do not share a mother tongue will use to negotiate a contract or conduct other important business when just “voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir” alone, even delivered in a really sexy voice, is not quite formal or detailed enough to seal the deal. This means that many people learning English as a Second Language (ESL) are trying to learn English well enough to do highly demanding judgement jobs while speaking English. I will never need to function as a professional in French. I have lived long enough to be part of a global lucky few who can go as far as their talents will take them, no matter how ambitious they are, speaking only the language they learned at their mother’s knee. The British Empire is long gone and the American Empire is on life-support but the English language enjoys still an exorbitant privilege that the rest of the world may decide to leave in place long after both are dust just as a matter of convenience.

I fell in love with French at around age fifteen, while growing up in Alabama, without ever hearing it spoken face-to-face by anyone. At that time, I had never encountered anyone who did not speak English. Finding English translations of Camus and Sartre at my local library was the beginning of an unrequited love of the French language that had nothing to do with any desire to visit France and everything to do with the way these translations and, later, French New-Wave films that I only saw years after they were released, spoke to me. I tried to learn French in college chasing after whatever was lost in translation. I never wanted to go to France. I wanted to read “Being and Nothingness” in the original French and follow French films without the sub-titles. Given this, it is not surprising that I made a “D” in “Intermediate French Conversation” the same term I made a “B” in a first course in reading French literature and writing about French literature in the original language. According to my instructor, I was the only student she had ever had who did better in her introduction to French literature than in intermediate conversation taking both in the same term. It helped that I had the English translation of L'étranger, one of the books we covered, half-memorized, was majoring in philosophy and convinced that Jean-Paul Sartre came closer to getting things right than any philosopher ever.

I can’t regret falling in love with French rather than Spanish all those years ago even though I would have been better off in many ways if I had chosen Spanish. Half-speaking Spanish would have had practical value during the many years I spent in Texas and Florida, teaching students some of whom spoke Spanish better than they spoke English. I would have had plenty of occasions to practice and could have achieved immersion just be moving to the right neighborhood. I might be functionally bilingual now and, better yet, functionally bilingual in English and the mother tongue of the largest group of people in American who might need the services of an ESL instructor. This, along with twenty years of experience teaching on-line, might be all that I would need to make a nice living working from home doing something I enjoy.

Medical Science

               This was written in response to a friend's medical crisis. I like it enough that I decided to share it with everyone. In 1987, I was told that I had pituitary cancer after taking an eye-exam. Further investigation revealed that I had a rare birth defect, unidentified until then. MDs always try to pretend that their fine art and dubious science has reached such a state of perfection that they know almost everything and are seldom wrong. The trouble is that MDs have been doing this since the time of Dr. John Dee, court physician to Queen Elizabeth I. Dee is remembered today as a ceremonial magician and I think there might be just a little hocus-pocus left in medical science even now.

               Have you read "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess? Burgess was told in 1960 that he was incurably ill and had, at most, two years to live. This caused him to sink into a clinical depression and begin drinking heavily so he did the logical thing; he moved to Moscow, Russia. Moscow was a very cheap place to live at that time. Burgess continued to drink heavily. That was about all there was to do in Moscow. There were no other distractions so he got a lot of writing done, five novels in one year to be exact. Burgess had gone to Moscow to finish as many novels as he could before dying so that the royalties would be enough to leave his family financially secure. One of these was "A Clockwork Orange". Beating the most optimistic prognosis of not one but many MDs by thirty-one years, Burgess died, a rich man, in 1993. Interestingly enough, he loathed the Kubrick film that helped make him rich intensely. Stephen King also loathed Kubrick's film of "The Shining" so intensely that, in 1997, a second version appeared based on a screenplay written by King. The two versions are very different. 
And Clarke hated Kubrick's 2001 because he wanted it to be about space aliens, and Kubrick made an intensely personal, metaphorical film that isn't actually about space at all. Clarke even walked out of the premiere before the movie was over.  The two weren't talking for years. This is reflected in a Time magazine cover on a table in the sequel, 2010. The text says something about USA v. Russia, but the pictures are of Clarke and Kubrick.

Bachelor Farmer

 He was Wesley Thompson's uncle. Wesley (who stood 6' 10") was a good friend in high school so I heard the story when it happened. The uncle's name was Caleb and he was one of those Norwegian bachelor farmers Garrison Keller talks about all the time except that Caleb was a redneck bachelor farmer. He lived alone about a half mile from his next-door neighbor and had a reputation even among the other farmers in the area for having a set of social skills significantly less well developed than what one would except to find in, for example, a barn owl. He was a creature of habit, so much so that you would probably call it OCD. He always wore a pair of one galosh over-all. Some say he only had one pair and ,therefore, never needed  to waste time going laundry. I cannot confirm this. It has been pointed out that he raised hogs and was none too careful about hygienic conditions in their one large pen. He was very good about pumping plenty of water out in and keeping the hogs well feed and was apparently considered a good and considerate master by hogs who thrived under his care and had no complaint. But Caleb never saw the need to pump anything back out. Some say that the result was living proof that hogs will happily wallow in anything that is kept wet and cool, which is what Caleb always assumed, perhaps because their standard of hygiene so closely matched his own that Caleb saw no reason to believe that his hogs were any more fastidious than he was.

               There was an odor that was hard enough to ignore that his next-door neighbors, a family who had worked the same land since the civil war, talked seriously about the possibility of relocation. But, honestly, even they, being closest to the source, could not say for certain what exactly made a shift in the wind that put them dead center down-wind from the Thompson place so memorable. A gas station a little further down the road did close down but they were corporate-owned and had only been there a year or two. Folks assumed that the decision to buy land and build there was made on a day when the Thompson place was upwind of a strong breeze. A farmer about a mile down the road, who traveled around the country working construction when he was younger, always claimed that this was obvious and cited it as proof that the "big bosses" never listen to a damn thing the people doing the actual work involved in building anything try to tell them.

               Anyway''''. Caleb always began his day by smoking a Swisher Sweet cigar while he sat in his out-house waiting for his morning call of nature to be answered. Caleb never saw the need to waste money on in-door plumbing or to pump shit, human or hog, out of a place where it was not bothering anyone. An odd thing about Methane gas is that it is heaver than air. If you really did want to make the closest thing to a lead balloon that you could manage, you would fill it with Methane. If you put shit in a pit and leave it there long enough, it eventually turns to Methane and stays put right where the original shit was dumped.

               Caleb, being a creature of habit, had begun his day with exactly the same ritual every morning for the last thirty years, without ever having the slightest problem that would have alerted him to any danger involved in continuing to do as he had done all his adult life. He would light his Swisher Sweet, step in the privy (French for "private place", explaining the term "privy council"), drop his one galosh overalls and smoke contentedly while he waited patiently for the welcome relief that had always quickly come before, just as it did once more on this occasion. Caleb would then toss the un-smoked portion of his Swisher Sweet into the hole he uncovered in rising, pull up his one galosh overalls and give the hogs their breakfast. How could Caleb have known that today was the day, thirty years in the making, when an ever larger and thicker earth-bound cloud of Methane gas had finally achieved critical mass, making the introduction of his still-lighted Swisher Sweet most unfortunate.              

               Caleb went out in a blaze of glory that broke a window or two next door and was buried in a closed casket for painfully obvious reasons. The hogs survived their master by only a day before being declared unfit for human consumption and sent to join Caleb in whatever version of heaven would seem heaven to them all given their unique habits and deeply treasured pleasures. I heard of all this and had to say something to Wesley. This was the only time in my life when I have had to offer condolences while carefully avoiding even the hint of a smirk. Wesley responded by inviting me to go ahead and laugh since no one, not even Caleb's immediate family, could help but notice how appropriate to the character of the man and his manner of life his passing had been. He died as he had lived and, besides, had not suffered at the end for any longer than it takes several sticks of dynamite to remove a troublesome stump from a field.

 

Intuition

Jung believed that intuition was a sense, a way of gathering information about reality just as important as sight. Intuition might also be called insight and defined as grasping the  significance of what you see based on a web of feelings and associations that makes that significance personal. This web acts as a code which gets us from what we see (signifier) to what this experience means (signified). One has to be in touch with one's feelings and lack any significant degree of denial in relationship to previous life experience to trust intuition as a guide to behavior. I often respond to situations out of what I know without being able to explain how I know or even what exactly I know with any clarity. This works out well for me more times than not. I often make decisions that are intuitively "right" for me without being able to articulate a motive that would justify those decisions as being "right" in any other sense. I can, however, often explain the motives behind those decisions in hind-sight from where making those decisions took me. I almost never know where I am going or why until I get there. People in denial also only know where they are and how they got there after the fact and keep returning to that place over and over again.

Scars just make your soul more interesting

I will never be a grown-up. Sometimes I fake it well and sometimes not so well. I’ve always liked the CCR song “Someday Never Comes.” There are no grown-ups. There is never a “someday” in your life when you suddenly say “I understand” and the world starts making sense. The world only starts making sense when you start ignoring all the things that hurt you so deeply that even the scars mark you as a member of the tribe of walking wounded who survived that particular awful something. Scars just make your soul more interesting. But, being a grown-up is acting as if the scars were not there in situations where acting as if they were would only make things harder. We have to hide the scars often in order to get our needs meet in the big world of pretend adults outside. Intimacy is dropping the mask and telling where it hurts. At some point, it is necessary to stop comparing resumes and start playing show and tell with the scars any “we” will have to deal with together, when the doors are closed and no one is pretending to be a grow-up. We eternal children call this “playing for keeps.”

The Shaman

The energy is very real which, in the process of working itself out, created religion as a trace. On the other hand, the process that creates every religion turns the free-play of signifiers that was in the beginning into a game with rules and boundaries. One is not allowed to edit and revise those rules or redraw those borders once the game is in progress; seeing any gap between the map and the territory strips the emperor naked, un-tunes the sky and makes it harder for the simply devout to properly digest their food, whether we are talking about material bread or spiritual sustenance.

A shaman is a visionary walking between worlds, gesturing madly in an attempt to make us see the absence of everything missing from our side of the divide. We live inside a map which is one of the worlds the shaman walks between. We call this map the real and see the other side as somehow surreal, as a dream sometimes collective and sometimes private. We think of inside information about everything we have made real by mapping as being hidden like ciphered messages or Easter eggs in these dreams. Insider trading is what most people have in mind if they pay rapt attention to some mad woman, suspected of hiding real secrets worth knowing inside a word salad of oblique allusion that never says but only suggests, making indirect reference to things always at least one link away on a chain of signifiers leading to something that is real because it has value inside the real. They are listening to a senile pirate muttering about a half-remembered map to real treasure more lost than hidden in ruined chains of tangled reference.

The shaman is no prophet. She does not claim exclusive rights to anything. She leaves no true map of things to ensnare later travelers. Religion provided the structural model for every later type of human collaborative involving enough people to make strong personal ties between everyone involved impossible. The shaman is always the mad woman hidden in the attic of every trace of spent energy, that is to say, of every organization. She remembers where all the wealth hoarded and even occasionally  nurtured within the structure came from. She knows the actual un-retouched or photoshopped behind the creation myth. She is an embarrassment, a resource and a threat. She is the secret weapon and the Achilles heel. The treasure was not made tinkering in a garage. It was born illegitimate in a flash of passion gift-wrapping an insight into the nature of the game. Sometimes the game is poker and the stakes of the game are the right to play law-giver but only the way a child plays enraptured at being king, wishing his magic to be real for now, for as long as free play continues, but then gone for good and quickly forgotten. It is not good to leave the world littered with the dry bones of dead play. Better to write the rules of a game yet to be by playing, just playing beyond and outside any game in the place where games wait with endless patience to be born and play dies in the very first moment the rules are spoken.

Nestle CEO: Water Is Not A Human Right, Should Be Privatized

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEFL8ElXHaU

 Peter Brabeck-Letmathe speaks for himself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEy4aT9Rd4g

The response

https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2015/03/27/18770528.php

Protest in California shuts down Nestle

The same thing is happening in Florida. 12 different companies hold permits giving them the right to drain as much water from our aquifers as they want. The price of this permit is all but nothing. This is not happening because anyone thinks it is good for the citizens of Florida. This is happening because the corrupt demagogues who keep conning their way back into office year after year in Florida with ads about God and how their opponent is a pedophile, closet Muslim terrorist or philatelist are getting fat on graft (the unscrupulous use of a politician's authority for personal gain). I am not exaggerating. The late Claude Pepper, running as an incumbent, lost his US senate seat representing Florida to an opponent, George Smathers, who accused Pepper of being a philatelist (someone who collects stamps) and a flaming heterosexual who practiced celibacy before his marriage to a woman who was already well known at that time as a thespian (someone who acts in plays).

         As we speak, many of the winners in the last election have already transferred their winnings off-shore while laughing at the stupidity of the deluded little dupes who put them in office. If you voted for Rick Scott, I am talking about you and the people you voted for last election and the election before and will keep voting for again and again until you die of either thirst or the long-range effects of drinking tap-water that will light if you put a match to it.           

The CEO of Nestle, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, thinks that phony people (corporations motivated exclusively by greed) and not real people (who live with water around or under them that they need to survive as much as the air around and above them) own all the water. In Florida, he is right thanks to that permit I mentioned earlier. Why does a phony Swiss citizen (Nestle) own the water under your feet? Because the people who get elected in Florida sold him (Nestle) a cheap permit that allows Nestle to make billions draining as much water as they can sell anywhere in the world from Florida's aquifers. This was a horrible deal for Florida and a very profitable deal for Nestle and, I am quite sure, for the fervent apostles of tickle-down economics that sold a permit worth billions for peanuts.

         Soon, Nestle will buy a license to hunt and fish. Ten years later, there will not be a fish swimming in fresh water or an edible beast left alive in the forests of Florida. Anything is possible in a state where politicians will sell the water right out from under their constituent's feet. Maybe Rick Scott and the whole sick crew will move to Switzerland after Florida becomes uninhabitable. That is probably where the money has gone already.