Christmas Quiz

The season that's in it, a Christmas literary quiz. From which well-known play have I excavated the following quote:

Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep.

Merchant of Truth- Rupert Murdoch

The mainstream media on the grand scale can be summed up by the fact that perhaps its most powerful individual, Rupert Murdoch, is also the world's most powerful ever pornographer, through, at least this side of the Atlantic, his Sky television network, proudly flooding the ordinary home with his many adult channels. Which contains more truth- Mr Murdoch's 'news' or pornography disseminations is a difficult question, but the answer by default probably the porn; it not making much in the way of claims to being anything more than itself, whereas the truth versions of his news distributions alleging to reflect reality in quite a real manner.
Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony anointed the great fascist pornographer Murdoch and his wife as members of the Pontifical Order of St. Gregory the Great in January, 1998. This knighthood, bestowed on behalf of the pope, is given to persons of "unblemished character" who have "promoted the interests of society, the [Catholic] Church and the Holy See [Vatican]."
We understand it wasn't so much his services to fascism or pornography that earned Murdoch the great honour, but his religious faith and subservience to that faith in both thought and action. One also assumes his sex-shows mustn't do anything in the way of encouraging the use of contraceptives.

In the Act

You are reading this sentence. You are now reading this one. And now this is exactly where your mind is located, inseparable from the mental activity in which it is engaged.
"Ah but what if I am not reading any of the above, or for argument sake lets say I am reading the third sentence. This makes a lie of the first two claims. They can't all be true simultaneously."
But they don't exist simultaneously. They exist as intellectual phenomena in the act of being read. For a baby, for example, whose attention is fixed on the writing, the words only exist as visual phenomena, and that is their full existence if only witnessed by that baby in that period. As intellectual phenomena, rather than simply visual, they require a compatible intellect to inhabit so as to exist as the intellectual phenomena that they are. Try to think of a sentence that is not being thought of. Tautologically impossible- it only exists when it is being thought of, and is real in the moment of thinking it.
The existential nature of a closed book is enough to drive a mind, sufficiently dogged in the pursuit of its elusive reality, mad.

So each of the three sentences are perfectly true statements- more of a mental achievement than might be imagined though there might be an argument for replacing you with I: ie "I am reading this sentence", etc. They are mind substances and cannot have a reality independent of the human mind, though of course the mind can have a reality independent of these effluences. Perhaps the individual intellect with which so many tend to identify themselves can be seen in a very similar light to all of this. And unlike intellectual phenomena, one can't even point at an individual intellect as an object. So is the "individual intellect" simply an intellectual phenomenon?
That, come to think of it, is what I have a feeling much supposed psycho-analytical theories simply amount to: rather than standing at the summit of a hierarchy of thought uniting all the other thoughts, simply the, more than likely delusional, thoughts produced at that moment, then falsely treated as anchors upon which to found a notion of self, and to bind the full self, falsely convinced these are its parameters, within those imprisoning parameters.

Observation

There is a certain type of person for whom life affords no greater pleasure than to watch other people working. For some unknown reasons, the most devoted instances of this species within a species are to be found in and around gaelic football and hurling pitches in rural Ireland when said pitches are host to fairly large and new-fangled machines engaged in drainage work.
Balancing this, there is also a type of person for whom life affords few greater irritations than to be watched while working by the first type.

Night & Water

An occasional, unfortunate and awkward by-product of a liking for night-time walks along and gazing into the many waterways of Cork city, particularly along the main docklands area, is to be accosted by a well-meaning type of soul who seems absolutely convinced that gazing into a city river by night must denote a suicidal desire to jump into said river. And maybe I shouldn't complain as just such interventions by strangers have surely salvaged quite a few momentarily broken human soldiers from such desperate actions. On the once or twice occasions when just such events have happened nothing I can say seems to convince the good Samaritan that suicide is not on my mind, and a somewhat comical passage of interaction occurs- one trying to convince the other not to kill himself, the other vainly trying to explain that there is an aesthetic pleasure to gazing into moving water, which is the full dynamic of the events the other mistakenly construes as verging on the imminently tragic. Perhaps it all comes from at source a certain type of person brought up in the heart of the country transplanted to the strange urban landscape, and its more unnatural and neurotic relationship with the natural world.

Anyway, no such event quite occurs on the following evening when, smoking a cigarette in a particularly remote spot, looking across at a ship in time-slowing manner ponderously turn and face out towards sea, I was thinking- and I think I really was- how much of a Tarkovskian scene it was, and if I were a filmmaker...when I belatedly noticed rapidly approaching footsteps. A haggard and feverish looking man grabbed me by the arm, fixed his highly charged, at least half-mad eyes on me, and demanded, "What is your wisdom?"
I quickly understood the nature of the scene and, perhaps out of an intermingling mixture of sympathy and self-preservation, imparted the following: "Life is the incarnated space between appearance and disappearance; that is to say, birth and death. Appearance in this realm coincides with disappearance from another, whilst disappearance from this realm is instantly followed by appearance in another."
This, as I must have intuitively divined, proved to be especially helpful to the distressed man, whose taut features softened and gaze became becalmed. He thanked me, gaze me a cigarette and walked off, heading away from the city, while I turned back towards it.

Another Dialogue

"There are many wonderful books that have never been written, some, naturally, greater than others."
"Show me these wonderful books."
"I can't. They've never been written."
"Then how do you know they exist?"
"They don't."
"Then how do you know they don't exist?"
"By their absence."
"But if you only know they don't exist by their absence, why are you talking of them as if they do exist?"
"I'll put it this way. If in 1850 someone had said that Crime and Punishment is a great book, would be have been lying?"
"But it wasn't written yet."
"So would he have been lying?"
"But it is a great book."
"So prior to its existence did it exist?"
"No, of course not."
"And did it not exist."
"Well I suppose for 'it' to not exist, it would have to be an it in the first place, in which case it would exist."
"Not bad. You're a far higher class of conversationalist than those that Plato employed."
"Yes men?"
"The worst."
"Anyway, have we come to some kind of philosophical conclusion, or is this all some Gogolian nonsense?
"I've no idea."

Jefferson, Liberalism, Conservatism, Democracy, Otherwise

Whether I've the time, inclination or ability to unite the ensuing loose threads into some half-decent form, only time will tell, but anyway:

Perhaps the most depressing current phenomenon in the public intellectual arena- predisposed admittedly by the existential nature of its participants to be depressing- is the actual use of 'liberal' as a term of negative and even abusive import.
As ever this public arena deals in the reduction of life to two dichotomies of near perfectly balanced idiocy, and depending on inclination, the good citizen aligns and identifies his very self with one of the two and hates the other with all his might since it, and it it alone, foils the utopian triumph of 'the good' with which he has identified himself; and then from the resulting squabbling of the two sides arises a synthesis of the two idiocies: the merger of two heaps of slightly different textured shite, or who knows, perhaps the outright victory of one of the heaps.

Skipping altogether for now the modern meaning of 'liberal' and his present-day foe, the 'conservative', where these words have broken loose from their linguistic moorings and now denote a whole host of implied convolutions to which ready-made composite beliefs the loyal individual signs up en masse . . . all this obfuscation arising from the fact that words are the least objective of phenomena, only meaning what we mean them to mean, and intentionally or not, the most potentially illusionistic of mediums, leading people down all kinds of strange pathways.

'Conservatism' is meaningless outside of a specific context. All it infers is that one is conservative about a set of values, though it tells us nothing about the actual values themselves, as a little less obviously the same could be said of liberalism. So in the attempt to make sense of the two linguistic phenomena of liberal and conservative we have to go back a couple of centuries to the birth of the modern democratic notion, and most usefully to its most obvious intellectual prophet, Thomas Jefferson. He wrote (uniting from different sources for the sake of continuity):

Men by their constitution are naturally divided into two parties. 1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the higher classes. 2. Those who identify with the people... who we hold are created equal, possess full inalienable rights, etc.
Call the two factions 1.serviles/conservatives, and 2. liberals.

The mass of man has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favoured few, boosted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.
Sometimes it is said man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to protect us. Let history answer this question....

So liberalism, in self-evident extension of the root 'liberty', was understood to imply the belief that man's natural condition is not to be a born slave, but an autonomous creature; sane and good in his true state, the possessor of himself, and certainly not the property of the artificial, human-made structure of 'the State'.
And in this original sense as the counterpoint to liberalism, conservatism means the preservation of the social order, with its foundation of man's perennial status as a slave- the possession of a ruling elite for whom the American democratic ideal of man's innate liberty is absolute anathema, and the conquering of this root of liberty which threatens everything they hold dear, ie their own power, would be an absolute priority.

Jefferson saw, as how could he not, that: "The blood of the people is become an inheritance, and those who fatten on it will not relinquish it easily", and so it would probably not be too much of a surprise for him to see that his notion of democracy bears no real resemblance to its alleged present incarnations, most particularly that of the United States itself, which rather than the beacon of democracy, "pointing out the way to struggling nations, who wish like us to emerge from their tyrannies also", became the policeman guarding against its liberating growth, as for example, to name but two examples, its overthrow, together with the dark knight of Britain, of the fledgling democracy of Iran under Mossadeq in the 1950s, and the Chilean government of Salvador Allende, installing in their stead vicious puppet regimes, thus conserving the desired existing order.
This corruption from within of the democratic experiment inevitable, excepting the utmost vigilance, as:

I do not believe with the Rochefoucaulds and Montaignes that fourteen out of fifteen men are rogues...But I have always found that rogues would be uppermost...for those who, rising above the multitude, always contrive to nestle themselves into the places of power and profit. These rogues set out with stealing the people's good opinion, and then steal from them the means of withdrawing it, by contriving laws and associations against the power of the people themselves.

Thus Hitler's Enabling Act, and America's Patriot Act and Military Commissions Act. Marxism incidentally is if anything an extension of the slave-state, since everything within the State, including its inhabitants, are the property of the State.
How the democratic experiment was covertly overthrown would obviously take too long- though to what extent it ever existed beyond the idea of itself is presumably very debatable -(special mention to this overthrow to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913) but to take a brief look at the history that unfolded with Jefferson's words as lens:

We have a perfect horror of connecting ourselves with the politics of Europe. Our first and fundamental maxim should be never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe; entering that field of slaughter to preserves their balance, to war against the principles of liberty...They are nations of eternal war.
I consider Europe to be a great mad-house, and in the present deranged state of their moral faculties to be pitied and avoided. There is no bravery in fighting a maniac.

And to demonstrate the huge transvaluation of values regarding the behaviour of a nation: "It is strangely absurd to think that a million of human beings collected together are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately."

With World War One( in spiritual essence, a loyalty fed mass-death ritual), America was dragged back into the madhouse, and this could be said to be for the conservatives the greatest boon of that organised insanity.
Jefferson would especially be horrified and disgusted to see that, instead of the envisaged oasis of pacifism where Jefferson wished the United States to possess no arms trade at all, the United States supplies roughly half of the global arms trade. An illustration no doubt of the conservation of the values of war.

British conservative, in the ideological sense, Roger Scruton writes "It is one of the most deeply rooted superstitions of our age that the purpose of education is to benefit those who receive it." Why? Because the individual is subservient to the State. He most certainly bears no relationship with the human of absolute value, embodied within the American Constitution. Scruton also talks very hazily of conservatism being more an attitude than a set of definite principles, and that attitude is loyalty to the existing order. The fruits of English loyalty Jefferson describes thus:

England presents the singular phenomenon of a nation, the individuals of which are as faithful to their private duties, as honourable, as worthy as any nation on earth, and whose government is yet the most unprincipled this day known.

This is a perfect archetype of the foundation upon which empire rests- an honest, servile population beneath a ruthless, immoral government. Aldous Huxley said that "goodness without intelligence is apt to be misled", and so the general population; while "intelligence without goodness apt to be diabolic", and so the ruling elite.

The English State's selfish principles render her incapable of honourable patronage or disinterested cooperation...The English government's piratical principles and practices, have no fixed term of duration.

So what does the current and ongoing incestuous entwining of American with the British government tell us of the the progression through time of the democratic experiment? As for recent crusades of "spreading democracy", Jefferson writes:

We no more believe in Bonaparte's fighting merely for the liberty of the seas, than in Great Britain's fighting for the liberties of mankind. The object of both is the same; to draw to themselves the power, the wealth and resources of other nations.

All ideals of government are essentially and necessarily autobiographical, extending from its author's sense of self. They are evolutionary concepts: stagnant, leading towards a dead-end, or towards a refinement of consciousness. The American democratic, republican concept is built on a foundation of moral truth as integral to the human condition, and as extension of this government should be 'rigorously free and simple': within reason, the less of it the better. The conservative authoritarian position, in this original sense, alive and thriving today, views the ordinary man as a slave to be exploited, and so the more powerful and absolute the governing powers the better.

So what sense of the human condition does the conservative, authoritarian position spring from? Leo Strauss, the neo-conservative ideologue- its principal prophet, writes "Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed." This corresponds exactly with the Adolf Hitler's view of man's nature. Evil is truth, and so the most evil are the most true. As a metaphysical doctrine this is diabolism. And to extend the insane logic a little further: since evil is truth then there is no moral basis for order, since, as Strauss admitted, the moral order doesn't exist. The only right is might.

Every belief system tries through its believers to incarnate itself, triumph over the contrary to itself. Democracy, built on the foundation of the goodness of the true human condition, aims and leads towards the highest self-realisation of the people within it, while the authoritarian state, built on the foundation of evil aims suicidally towards self-annihilation, as self-hatred cannot be indefinitely conserved. So in these archetypal versions, the extermination camps are the natural exercising of the belief-system; the creation of hell on earth, the triumph of evil over liberty or 'liberalism'.

The mental source of this thought of man as evil, as with every thought, is in the mind of its thinker, and here the individual having poured his consciousness into false forms, then makes of his inevitably debased sense of self a general rule of mankind. Being false, he sees evil everywhere, but perhaps for the blind spot of its source in his own corrupted consciousness. In the purest case he obsesses with insanity and depravity, inevitably finds examples other than his own, and exults in the discovery as a twisted justification of his own unhappy and perverted consciousness. It is the equivalent of a psychiatrist bringing a sane man into a lunatic asylum, showing him the worst cases, and then pronouncing insanity to be man's natural condition. If the sane man utters protest, says this is delusional at every level, the psychiatrist, a 'realist,' shouts, "Are you mad? Look at them!" Yes, they're insane, and so are you. As a general rule, any philosophy derived principally from intimate connection with, and analysis of, the mentally or/and socially unwell, is likely, or certain rather, to be more or less equally unwell.

Far from being naive about the existence of evil, liberalism in its true social, political form recognises it as the gravest threat, and so Aldous Huxley writes: "Democracy is based on the principle that power is often abused, and should be entrusted in limited amounts only." And Jefferson: "Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers alone." As history clearly shows, particularly relatively recent history, it is power in the hands of a centralised state that offers immeasurably the most threats to mankind.

And so when an ordinary citizen, not a member of the ruling elite, despises the liberal ideal, beneath all the nonsense is the simple statement that "I am a slave, and that is my rightful state, where I rightfully remain." It is the software of the Slave Mentality in perfect working order.

Unfortunately, having to end with a quick look at the modern notion of liberalism.
As democracy has been utterly diluted and perverted as a concept, so inevitably would one expect liberalism to itself be perverted as a concept. In its true form, and this is what makes it so revolutionary as a political, rather than simply religious, concept or system, its foundation is the intrinsic moral goodness and sanity of the human condition- when sane, of course. On the one hand exists the conservative, fascist position as spoken by Strauss as viewing reality as evil( insofar as mentally deranged concepts can be said to exist). On the other, the modern 'liberalism' which seems compelled to feel equally liberal about all truth versions. So nothing can be true as this would make something else false. So both modern versions of the conservative and liberal positions are equally truthless in terms of a moral order, both having the same root in truthlessness. They are both simply false, and there is no real hierarchy with falsehood.

Also to add that I am not particularly interested in the person of Jefferson, but the ideas and ideals incarnated and aspired to. There is no need to require foisting perfection on any man, and then when imperfections are almost inevitably shown, the edifice of faith collapsing in ideal crushing despair.

Wordy Endeavour

"You're writing a book? What kind of book?"
"Well, it's got real people in it."
"Real people? But they're made of language, aren't they?"
"Well, yes of course."
"And real people aren't made of language."
"Well, that's debatable. Some people think they are."
"They think they're creations of the words in their own heads? Lunatics. Anyway, tell me about these 'real people'."
"There's one I'm very happy with, who I think is very relevant. He's a great critical thinker of the modern age and the times we live in now."
"He sounds like a right asshole. Anyway, what of him? What are his conclusions, how does he reach them, et cetera, et cetera?"
"Well, he reaches them like everyone else of course. He reads the newspapers and watches the television."
"So he's handed a very crude jigsaw puzzle, assembles it, and then calls the resulting structure his own creation. I congratulate you on your realism. He sounds exactly like the kind of thinker who thrives in 'the times we live in now.'"

Free-Will & the External Seer

Consider a video recording of a football match. As the game was actually played the players have absolute freedom to act of their own volition. However, watching this later their actions obviously will not change, which is not to say that they were deprived of free will as they acted. Similarly we could talk of a kind of external observer of life- lets call him God- existing free of our notion of time, knowing exactly what happens within our time, but this not contradicting the freedom within the moment of the actors of the drama.

Overheard in a Petrol Station

"Modern Western film amounts to mediocre literature with a camera added."
"Modern Western literature amounts to mediocre literature without a camera added."

Logic of Monarchy

Within a monarchy the general populace are 'subjects' to a monarch, who, generally by virtue of bloodline, is intrinsically superior to the people. And so the British national anthem is God Save the Queen, not God Save the People. The people find their validation before God in the person of the monarch.
And since no human can be more than human, and the monarch is human, the necessary logic here is that Britons are, within the framework of the State, subhuman; intrinsically lesser than, 'subject' to, another who contrarily is human.
Knighthoods and the like can be seen as conferred blessings from above where the subhuman subjects ascend towards the highest ideal of human existence, though since this state is unique to the monarch, in the absence of becoming monarch oneself, becoming human cannot be attained. Servility is one's natural and rightful state of being.

A different starting-point takes us a similar route, and that is the notion that the royalty are indeed more than human, which seems to have been often the ancient use of kingship. The same dynamic of ascendancy reigns, with the people as centres of consciousness less real than the monarch, but here the people are granted the status of human, but to be human is itself as a biological condition to be a slave species and there is no route upwards to the throne of existential creation.
Which of the two variations is more traumatic to the subjects is debatable.

One might say this is archaic and fantastic; that now we have full rights and all the rest of it, but this is to view the human condition very superficially. For one thing, subconsciously the self understands the implied truth of all the above, even if it is rare that it will bubble up into conscious awareness. This intrinsic servile mental software has been part of the human condition for vast stretches of time and won't disappear overnight, or even over a century or two. Though of course it could disappear in an enlightening flash for the individual. Progress here consists not in an expansion but an unwriting or vanishing of the software.

Acolyte

"The system is collapsing into chaos."
"Yes, perhaps, but I still have perfect faith in it."
"You moron."

Edifying

In this work, in full justice to the work of literature it aspires to be, there will be no appearance of an author; simply the existential fact of a pure text.
"But everyone knows a work of literature doesn't just appear. There must be an author."
Maybe, but he is irrelevant. We just have the text.
"But this is the text."
So far, yes.
"And all it amounts to is two characters discussing the nature of the text."
Yes, well, they can be two characters within it.
"But if they're within it, how can they be aware of their existence within it?"
Look, all I want to do is write a straight-forward story, and instead I find myself bogged down in this kind of tortuous rubbish.
"Well get on with it then."
All right, start again. I am the author, but I won't be appearing in the rest of the book. You can assume my existence if you want, as, yes, it would be nonsensical to assume my non-existence. But even though I am perpetually present, this presence is irrelevant, and it would be better to assume my absence, that is, not to assume anything, just to read it in a state of intellectual innocence if at all possible. How's that?
"Fine. But just one thing- is it a text or a world?"
What do you mean?
"I mean, obviously it's a text, but is it a text accepting its nature simply as a literary creation, only existing because someone is writing it and someone else reading it; or is it pretending to be an autonomous world of reality, into which domain the reader, who isn't mentioned, has stumbled?"
It's not pretending to be either.
"What's it pretending to be?"
It's not pretending to be anything.
"You've lost me."
I mean it's just a bunch of fucking words.
"You can't say that. No publisher will accept 'just a bunch of fucking words.' Even 'prose piece' or 'imaginative flight' has probably become too esoteric these days. Anyway, people aren't stupid, you know."
People are stupid.
"Well, maybe they are. But they'll still begin to realise you don't have any real interest in writing stores in the first place; just an excuse to mess around with this kind of nonsense."
This is all getting too much. Which one of us am I again?
"What do you mean?"
Am I the author or the second voice.
"You're the author. It's not been that confusing, surely. Anyway, it's easy- you don't have any inverted commas around what you're saying."
Oh right. Okay, I better think of a story.

Jim Marrs- Rise of the Fourth Reich

Part One here. Part two. Part 3. Four. Five.
"The citizen who sees his society’s democratic clothes being worn out and does not cry it out, is not a patriot, but a traitor.” Mark Twain

Wisdom of The Man on the Street/ Nature Abhors a Vacuum

"Human nature abhors a vacuum. If man doesn't fill his head with one form of nonsense, he'll most likely fill it with another."

MSN

I take that previous post back- there are clearly not processes trying to turn humanity into a species of infantilised morons, as shown by the most prominent lines on the homepage of MSN, which also show how democracy has poured itself into such vibrant forms of choice:

MSN Battles: Which celebrities are in and which are out
Who is hot and who is not
You decide - On MSN Battles

Also the important selection of recent human phenomena:

Madonna watched by Rodriguez from front row
Spears 'ready to get started' with career, says mum
Carey's acting skills praised by co-star

And also the joyous news that "MSN has just made life easier." A key moment in human evolution.

Biblical Oath

Regarding the practice of swearing an oath on the bible in a court of law it would seem only natural to refer to the attributed words of the central human figure in that book, he being Jesus:

I say unto you, Swear not at all;
neither by heaven; for it is God's throne:
Nor by the earth; for it is his footstool; neither by Jerusalem...
Neither shall though swear by thine own head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black.
But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.

So it is perfectly clear that to swear on the bible is an absolute transgression of the book, and that in essence the word of anyone under oath to the bible is according to Jesus' words intrinsically worthless and a mockery of that book in its Christian essence. Given that the legalistic world is supposed to excel specifically in its use of logic this is all so blatantly obvious that it's hard to understand what to make of it. The obvious implication is that all testimony in all court cases so far taken under biblical oath should be struck out as inadmissible.