The Enemy: Death

The recent execution of the possibly innocent Troy Davis reminds me of a conversation I had many years ago with a friend about execution, and my position then was about what it is now (which I will explain throughout). It shocked me that he, a religious person, believed it to be a necessary element of justice. I thought, and still think, that the main enemy in the Bible is death, hence: the doom of the descendants of Adam and Eve to return to dust; the first crime after leaving Eden is murder (of Abel), and Cain is banished from the Lord; that throughout the Old Testament, thousands are executed because they have forsaken the will of the Lord of Life, and therefore are already dead, their execution merely fulfilling it; the fact that Christianity rests on the Resurrection of Jesus Christ; passages like 1 Corinthians 15:50-57 (or perhaps all of Corinthians); and so much else. I therefore look upon death with great loathing, and wish it on no one. 

This includes those who supposedly deserve to die. Execution is (supposedly) the worst punishment available for criminals. But I ask, who orders the sentence, man or God? In the Old Testament, it is presumably Yahweh; but we have no decrees from on high now saying that so-and-so has forfeited his right to life, therefore what little remains is to be taken from him: all we have is the State and Personal Vendettas. I do not trust the State with anything, especially not Life, so I obviously have even less trust in their ability to execute. This is supported by instances like Troy Davis' recent demise, who may or may not have been innocent, but the fact that the question still remained (well, for those outside government its seems) should have put such a finality out of consideration. Likewise, revenge is perhaps an even shakier ground for justice, as vengeance is carried out usually without much consideration for evidence and the like. However, we can punish people who carry justice out on their own, but how do we punish the State when it blunders and murders innocent people? As for the Big Evils, like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, serial killers, etc., the same should hold, because it is how we treat the worst among us that shows how good our best qualities really are. I cannot say that I am not relieved that these men have no more chance to raise Hell on Earth, and like Satan they were Agents of Death, but I still derive no pleasure from their death. In this case, the enemy of my enemy is still my nemesis. 

It should be plain by now that death is not my friend; yet, there is much today in the way of praising death for supposedly making life meaningful. I believe it was Freud who advised us to make friends with the necessity of dying. For me, I would change "necessity" to "inevitability." We need not die, but yet we do. To accept this is to realize that our days are short and that we must make the most of them; therefore, people say that death makes us realize the value of life (and the more imminent, the more valuable it becomes). I do not deny this, but ask: do we have a choice? Are presented even once in our lives the chance of immortality? Do we know what it is like to have life into a time without boundaries? Or are we hostages from the cradle to the grave, prisoners of the Inevitable? To accept death is to make do with a situation that we have no option of escaping. I often wonder what it would be like if we all did live forever. Would we be so accepting of death then? Or would we look at it as it should be looked at: the greatest of enemies?

The Sudden Legend

Recently I've been reading through the Ancient Greek plays (or rereading, as with Euripides' Bacchae); this includes Euripides' Trojan Women, Aristophanes' Lysistrata and Frogs, and Aeschylus' Oresteia Trilogy. All of these, as well as almost all other plays these Greeks wrote, dealt with myths and legends that even at their time in the 5th century B.C. were ancient. However, an event happened that was so monumental that it instantly attained the status of a play-worthy story: the Persian Wars, in which the Greek underdogs defeated the massive forces of Xerxes in humiliating defeat, particularly at one of the most stunning naval victories of all time, the Battle of Salamis. The Greek world was stunned by their triumph. In Athens, the poets and playwrights saw, aside from the greatness of it, what C. John Herington called "a perfect exemplification of the ancient law of hybris-ate; almost, one might dare to say, the incarnation of it, on the grandest conceivable scale." He wrote this in an introduction to Persians, written by Aeschylus only 7-8 years after Salamis, in which he fought. Persians tells of the aftermath of the battle from the view of defeated; it begins with the chorus of Persian regents at Susa, the capital, praising their empire and emperor. Atossa, the queen and Xerxes' mother enters and joins. However, a messenger arrives and delivers the bad news: the Persian navy has been destroyed and the army's morale has been struck a mortal blow, and in their retreat have nearly completely perished from hunger and the elements. There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth, they call forth the ghost of Darius, Xerxes' father and former emperor who had made Persia great, who explains all, and then Xerxes himself enters, completely miserable and humiliated. Of course, Aeschylus would have no way of knowing the inner workings of Susa on that day, or any day really, so the play is mostly imagination playing upon the common tragic theme of that time, overweening pride. Xerxes dared to overcome nature and the gods, and thought that by merely amassing a large force, he could defeat a supposedly inferior people; the gods thought differently.

Now, some two and a half millennia later, we face a similar situation. The disaster of September 11, 2001 has had global consequences, and yet, people in the arts are very wary on how to approach it. Granted, the Greeks who wrote about the Persian Wars were of the victors, so they didn't face the burden of calamity. As a slew of articles today in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch have shown, there is great unease in movies, television, even theatre and literature. Most works include 9/11 slant-wise, sometimes making it seem like we only see the World Trade Center in the distance through a window, or at other times making it the white elephant in the room that everyone feels to reverential about to mention. Some have dealt with it directly: there's United 93, a movie dramatizing the events on the plane and on the ground about the people who courageously but perilously sabotaged one of the missions; there is another movie, World Trade Center, whose title explains enough. I also should mention documentaries, like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Loose Change 9/11, which raised grave questions about practically everything. In music, the composer John Adams was commissioned to write a commemorative work, and produced On the Transmigration of Souls, which is shattering, and Steve Reich wrote a string quartet called WTC 9/11, which faced controversy recently for the album's cover art. This particular controversy is endemic of what seems to be the large problem, which is: what is proper? Where is the line between reverence and sacrilege, the line between mere truth and too much? 9/11 has become a sudden legend; the truth about the events of that day, as well as its cause and effect, have already entered the foggy realm between objective truth and metaphorical truth, as well as being corrupted by official lies and common prejudices. But unlike the joyous victory for the Greeks that were the Battle of Salamis and the Persian Wars, 9/11 was a disastrous defeat for the whole world, and we are all burdened with that question of what is proper, so until we figure out our stance, we can only tell the truth slant, if there remains any truth by the time we feel comfortable.

The New Agists, Under Which are the Literalists and Hypocrites

[Part 1 in my "Return of the Gods" series; sorry for the delay]

Religion is a feel-good enterprise these days, at least with Christianity. It more and more adopts the New Age mantra of "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change" (yes, that is the title of a musical) regarding others. But when one reflects on oneself, the third part of that phrase is frequently ignored; it's not always that people fail to see what needs to be changed, but that they fail to do it at all. Can it be because God loves them, no matter what? When something is accepted as it is, it is not going to be changed, so I wonder if some people, feeling the Divine Love, slough off any feeling of the need for change. I will leave that particular strain up to you to decide, after sharing this thought: perhaps instead of loving us, should we be concerned if God likes us?

My concern is the age-old problem of using religion to justify anything and everything. Self-justification is making oneself feel good about what one thinks or does, so it is relevant to my opening statement. Though, as Aesop pointed out in his fable "The Wolf and the Lamb," a "tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny," the tyrant's position can seem more secure if he uses a widely accepted source for defense. Enter the Bible and other religious texts. I love the Bible, the greatest anthology in the world, as the magnificent collection of literature it is. A problem arises when people take it for its word (instead of its Word). These Literalists are multiplying madly currently, and these little tyrants have been finding all sorts of pretexts. Anyone with a decent knowledge of how literature works should know better than to read poetry (good poetry, anyway; as Oscar Wilde said, "all bad poetry is sincere"), exactly as it is written. The Bible, which also contains writing of a wonderful mixture or fiction and non-fiction (it is not my concern here how correct the Holy Book is on history and science, only how it is interpreted), loses much of its luster and gains much terror in the hands of the Literalists. Much of Protestantism in America is overrun with these people; Catholicism, not to be left out, is catching up. You see them when they claim that the world was created in 144 modern hours; when they interpret any and every natural disaster as a sign from God; when they justify taxation with Jesus' admonition to "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's"; and so on. A favorite recourse seems to be Leviticus, though that is as much a good read as the Communist Manifesto, and is, in terms of good literature, the weakest book in the Bible; needless to say, much of its strictures are antiquated. Though it will be more important with the Hypocrites, Literalists also pick-and-choose the chapters and verses they use, perhaps to avoid the logical dissonance that would result from their preconceived notions meeting with a text that didn't support them. Now, their positions might be more justified if the words they take as exact fact were the words first written. But they attempt to literalize translations from languages quite different from our own. There is always something lost in translation, particularly with poetry, whose word choice is very exact. I think that is enough that needs to be said on that matter. In any case, my problem with Literalists is that I read the Bible largely as metaphor, with its central figure, God, being the greatest of all metaphors, since He is Everything; and you can't read a metaphor literally.

A frequent crossover with these people are the Hypocrites, who are of a much larger breed. The capital 'H' is significant, because these people don't just say one thing and do another; rather, they are one thing, and yet really are another. Many Christian-claiming people really are nothing of the sort (someone said that if Christ came back today, he wouldn't be a Christian; Nietzsche said that there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross). You cannot serve both God and Mammon, yet many try. Republicans are on the gallop lately, savoring the chance to be President, and most claim to be Christians. Yet, do their views side with the Prince of Peace? You cannot both take up the Cross of Christ and take up offensive war. "Just War Theory," even in its looser interpretations, still does not allow for the blood-lust most of the Republican candidates display (to be fair, this is also rampant among Democrats). And isn't there a disconnect between being Pro-Life with fetuses but not with those already born? This is probably the biggest instance, but there are others. For example, Christian redistributionists justify their actions using the Bible's declarations to help the poor; what they overlook is the more important fact of the New Testament's implications for free will, that charity is something to be encouraged, not enforced, and that it becomes void when not done willingly. When Jesus said that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a rich person to get into heaven, he was not damning the wealthy because of their wealth; if that were so, then why does God make so many prosperous (as a friend pointed out)? Rather, it is the lack of will to relinquish material positions to follow Christ prevalent among most people that is the problem (or, to make it less religious, the need for renunciation in order to change). There is a deep rankness among people who truly believe they are Christians and yet overtly discard Christ's most important lessons, and it must be by Doublethink.

The New Agists, subsuming Literalists and Hypocrites, are helping to bring back a Theocratic Age by instituting theocracy itself; in other words, deeply politicizing religion, and making their God the President. Christ, who denied Satan's gift of the nations because they are of this world and Christ is of the Kingdom of God, is becoming very worldly. How else do you explain the American flag being flown above the Christian flag at a church, or that there is even a Christian flag at all? How else do you explain Christ being used to exonerate agents of offensive war, from soldiers to politicians? How else do you explain using a figure who freely died for others to endorse forced redistribution? How else do you explain several Republicans claiming they are on a mission from God, that they were called, as though they were the Blues Brothers? God was very clear himself about what he thought of earthly kings (1 Samuel 8:7-18). No, for me Christ is renunciation, who gave to the world what was the world's, his human aspects, so that he could be like his Father God. His love is not a justification for not changing that which can and should be changed (the New Agists, who think "you are beautiful, no matter what they say" or that you are perfect, even though perfection is a finality impossible for humans, who must change to love as Kiekegaard said); his parables and the prophecies are not meant to be understood at word, but are meant for rumination to discover who you are (the point of all literature), and therefore what needs to be changed; and his wisdom cannot be both claimed and ignored, and the hypocrisy is worst when used for political expediency. Religion has always been (unfortunately) tied to the State, but there seems to be something arising that is more than marriage, and I think it is that as the two meld more and more, the newest religion we'll see is Politicism, where people will worship at temples like the White House. This process is already well underway, as America elected a President running on the rather non-governmental concerns of Hope and Confidence ("Yes We Can"), and who is (or was) spoken of with a reverence unbecoming of a politician.

Therefore, the next segment will discuss the emerging religion of Politicism, and it's grave dangers for man.

The Return of the Gods: An Introduction

Those who know their history know we are doomed to repeat it.

That formulation came to mind a few days ago in a conversation about history; it was meant in jest, but I almost immediately seized upon its import, and it has been coursing about my head for a bit, desiring me to do something with it. Running concurrently with that is the culmination of tempered dealings with a certain difficult person, who has lately moved me to condemnation (not directly with this person, since that would achieve nothing), leading me to begin writing a blog post. After two paragraphs and a day's reflection, I realized that I was writing a few essays in one: a rant, essentially, and that I was skirting about the what I really needed and wanted to focus on. Reenter the heading line of this post; I realized that what I needed to focus on was a topic of great interest to me since I first heard about it, for it is a Big Idea. First learning of him in the critical writings of Harold Bloom, Giambattista Vico proposed in his magnum opus Scienza Nuova (The New Science) a revolution of history in which there are three "distinct stages (corsi): the ages of gods, heroes, and men," until there is a return (ricorsi) to a theocracy, in which people are most poetical (Bloom proposes a fourth, intermediate stage, at least in literature: a chaotic age, a transitional period back to a theocratic age).  Bloom believes that we are in the final stages of the Chaotic Age, and indeed are already in the midst of a new Time of Gods; this series of posts is my acceptance, reasoning, and explication of this notion.

What is most central for me is the concern of what this ricorsi already looks like (and hence why I think it is upon us), where it could go, and the question of authority. There will be plenty of compare and contrast between the previous Theocratic Age and the incoming one, at least as much as I can muster. anyway Since this is a blog, I feel the need to be short, concise, and must forbear deep research and thorough essaying; consider it the first foray into a possibly larger project. I do not have all the posts planned, but since I am writing about a new Dawn of Deities, I will start with Religion, and I know I will follow it with Science; indeed, the rest of the series will focus on the institutions of authority present in our world.

Like Fortuna here.

"But enough about me. Why don't you talk about me . . ."

It is not in my nature to talk about myself (at least directly). Part of it is a feeling of inferiority, another part is a flight from solipsism, which I always fear I am sinking into. Even in this blog, I try to stay away from myself and focus more on the topic, so that anything relating to me personally is incidental. This can be great for aesthetic pursuits, as with that paragon Shakespeare, who so removed his self from his works that we know, to paraphrase Borges, everything and nothing about him. It is not so great in life.

Despite so much praise and so much belief from others that I will succeed fabulously, I must admit that I suffer from a rather low sense of self-regard and an immense doubt that I'll amount to even a hill of beans, and it is nothing new. I had two small nervous breakdowns before college, and almost another one, which, in an attempt to quell it before it overtook me, led to telling my parents I am bi, which only helped in taking my mind from one issue to another. The first two dealt specifically with the immense burden I felt to succeed (mostly coming from myself), while the almost-one was related to my sexuality. But they all were connected by the feeling of unworth. I did not think I could succeed, and I did not like myself at the time for liking all sexes (oh, younger me. . .). Only now am I fully getting over the latter, but now that the stakes are higher, the former is even more troublesome. As a composer, I have to go in with a certain mentality that what I am doing is good, at least worthy of performance, or why bother? Almost every day, though, I face the fear that I am outmoded, old-fashioned, and practically every new piece is a reluctant embrace of more "modern" practices (though I am really embracing the expansion of my personal art). This inferiority is also a hindrance to conversation, for rarely do I feel like I have something of interest to say (which compounds my natural shyness and difficulty with words while talking).

As stated above, another part of the problem is the desire to avoid falling into myself. Solipsism, "the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist," is great in art (Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest is a great example), but you should probably turn the other way if you encounter a solipsist. For me, the temptation to fall into such a state is a defensive measure, a shielding from  that which could cause me trouble. To ward it off, I try to take myself as un-seriously as possible. The title of this blog is a somewhat serious thing, but it is also my joke on the egotism involved in blogging. Also, I think arrogance can coincide with solipsism; a friend asked about the difference between arrogance and confidence, and among the answers, I offered that arrogance is the opinion of others that one has padded his resume; for a solipsist, his resume is everything. It is a dangerous trait to have, because, as I understand it, it comes at the expense of empathy. At any rate, though I don't think I will truly become such, I fear it nonetheless.

I offer this much of myself, first, to get it out of it the way (so I can avoid bringing it up again and again on this blog), but also to discuss the notion of talking about oneself. How far can one go in self-praise before it becomes boasting? How much should one reveal to anyone and everyone? Is there such a thing as full disclosure, and if so, is it a good thing? And how much should privacy be sacrificed? I have chosen to forgo some privacy for myself by writing having this blog, but I still retain the right to my self. These are self-revealing times, and people leave much too little to be desired.