What’s the good of Freedom to the Ignorant?

                     [thoughts from   ~burning woman~   ]

“What’s the good of freedom to the ignorant?” (Ursula K. LeGuin, “Powers”)

A critical question that should be endlessly considered by those who claim to live in freedom; who claim to live within democracies.  Are these people intelligently educated, and are they, in fact, free?  To the intelligently educated, the word “freedom” conveys an endless number of meanings, and shades of meaning, constantly being internally debated.

But what does it mean to an ignorant lout?  A redneck?  A “fool” who lives at the beck and call of guts and brawn?  To the consummate shopper?  To the assembly line worker mind-numbed and beaten by endless, meaningless labour? To the denizen of the computerized cube farm? 

Raised in “relative poverty” (Canadian style, meaning we almost always had enough to eat, and enough clothing and housing to survive the harsh elements of a northern clime – nobody froze to death) I remember only too well having to interact with braggart, illiterate ignorance in grade school.  Later, standing alongside never stopping feed belts in canneries, numbed by the repetitiveness and clanking, hissing noise, checking, adjusting, clearing, stacking… I remember my quickly fading choices.  Was this back-breaking, brain-numbing work going to be my life?

To the ignorant, such situations call for camaraderie: misery loves company, and there was a lot of company; too much company.  These are also great opportunities for ass-kissers and bullies to rise quickly to their own levels of incompetence, loved by higher levels of managers because they consider this loyalty to the company, hence to themselves.  These are the people who snitch and prevent rebellions and talk of unionization, or who management encourages in seditious talk against unions to other employees in hopes of de-certification.  

And so, the ignorant are the great base, the pedestal upon which the masters wine and dine themselves, taking, taking and taking, never having to give any account to anyone because they have their ignorant base to walk over; to dance on. 

In America, the world just witnessed the “election” of a thorough boor, elected and to this moment, supported, by the ignorant masses who fear freedom above anything else, because they know that freedom entails responsibility and responsibility demands the kind of commitment they aren’t willing to put their minds into.  The chains worn by the consumer society do not seem so onerous to bear.

“The wall of forgetting was down.  I was able to think, to speak, to remember.  I was free.  Freedom was unspeakable anguish.” (Ursula K. LeGuin, “Powers”)

In such a morally depraved civilization as this, if “it” is making you feel safe, comfortable, happy, “it” isn’t freedom.  If it is making you rich, with power over others, “it” isn’t freedom.  If if demands that you arm yourselves to the teeth to go and oppress and exploit others in their own countries, to force them to your ways and to take their resources and labour, “it” certainly isn’t freedom.  Conversely, if “it” is dispossessing you; pushing you into deeper debt; into poverty; unto the street to survive by begging or crime, then obviously “it” isn’t freedom. 

Freedom neither gives, nor requires, any of those things.  Freedom can only be given, and shared, freely between willing participants.  This is what the promoters of “freedom and democracy” western style fear anyone learning about. 

To forestall such a thing becoming too common knowledge they invented the now practically global public school system, unofficially known as Official Brainwashing.  At the end of twelve years, give or take, of this waste of youthful years ooze the drones: workers, believers, consumers, hoarders, spectators, whiners, bitchers, complainers, addicts, gamblers, inmates and voters: the entitled to freedom, western style. 

For those who continue seeking after greater official ignorance comes Academic Higher Ignorance.  At the end of that, degrees indicating successful completion of various courses in Official Master Ignorance are handed out.  Having proved themselves adept at rising to their own level of State Approve Ignorance,  these may then be able to go into various channels of rip-off industry, including banking, politics, drugs, medical business, law, corporate engineering, technology and scientific research and through it all, the military, or Official Murder Industry.  Less prevalent today, but always eager to make a sudden come-back is Religion.  It too demands its slate of Officially Mandated leadership in Statutory Ignorance. 

To ensure only a minimal number ever wake up long enough to realize the massive scam they’ve been led into,  the System saddles their Worthy Ignorant with tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of “student debt”, another euphemism for the slave collar. 

You can’t be rebellious when you need a position to repay your debts, buy a house, and try to match the lifestyle of other Officially Ignorant in your line of pretend expertise.  And if you are not rebelling, you are acquiescing, and if you are acquiescing, you are supporting, and if you are supporting, you are a slave along with the others in your slave quarters.  And your greatest curse is that a part of you is always aware of this fact; a fact that can only be borne by an endless stream of distractions.  Enter the entertainment, news and social Media, organized Sports and spectator politics.  And war.  Ultimately, was is the greatest distraction of them all.  That’s why it’s unofficial title is The Endless War.

Freedom?  Of course I’m free.  I’m free to be an ignorant slave.  No anguish; no moral issues; no agonizing conundrums; no worries.  The “House” will take care of us and all our needs, for the “House” owns us all, amen!  

Perhaps, why Romantic Love Fails

{a change of topic, though perhaps not so alien to my usual posts in meaning.  Think: self-empowerment… again or at least, serious choice.}

The title, then, is:  “Perhaps, why Romantic Love Fails”  and let’s be generous and add “most of the time, not always, not automatically.”  

Bracing myself here, this should, or could, bring “romantic love” experts out of the woodwork to offer their own experiences, or beliefs, to praise or castigate, and all of that is totally fine by me.

 “Oh love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me. I’ll be anybody you want me to be.” — Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters.

Imagine the amount of energy it takes to keep this up, to be “anything you want me to be” to someone, just for the fleeting sensual moment of feeling loved. Who then is really being loved when the ploy works? The pretender, the imitator, the parrot, the ghost: an elaborate illusion.  Not me, not the real me, just the character played by the actress. 

Any wonder romantic love so often fails?  

He isn’t loving me, he’s loving the pretence I serve him from morning ‘til night and the moment I can no longer sustain the illusion, he loses interest and perhaps rightfully, blames me for his disinterest.

“You’ve changed,” he’ll say. And right he is. Under the pressure of time and expectations, I gradually drop the illusion with which I ensnared him and I become myself, someone he’d never had a chance to get to know.

Perhaps if I hadn’t been so eager to “get him” and satisfy my longing by serving him with an illusion?

Perhaps if I had had the wisdom to look into the future to those times and event when I could see the illusion would be unsustainable; perhaps if I’d been courageous enough to show him who I really was, he may have loved me for myself, and we might have had something more than a staged performance…

Perhaps, and that’s the saddest realization of all, if he’d seen the real me he may have loved me for myself and never experienced disillusionment.  

Perhaps, like so many in my situation, I’ve been an idiot, turning myself out as a zip-lock bag of bait instead of the solid full meal deal I could have been; that I really was.

Perhaps, but perhaps is a lot like “if” and as Roger Whittaker sang, “No, I don’t believe in if anymore, if’s an illusion, if’s an illusion!”

So, I let the illusion go and live alone.  It’s not so bad once you get used to it and you have a few friends who don’t live in expectations of you pulling rabbits out of fancy hats.  Also, I must admit, love, however ephemeral, did have its compensations.  I had some really good times.  

I choose to remember the good loving times.  As to the separations, and I’ve known a few, the first was extremely bitter, then each one after that became easier, more natural, rather expected.  The thing about us is, we can get used to anything, even learning to enjoy experiences that at the outset appear unthinkable and disastrous.  

Looking back and thinking, if I were a few decades younger, would I fall in love again? Oh yes, definitely, for a great evening of being taken out to dinner, dancing, or the opera; for a night of pure heedless bliss with or without a full moon, and a sweet goodbye in the morning.  

Oh yes, I would fall in love… and fall in love… and fall in love… and make each fall redemptive.  In between, I would live alone in a world that is all mine. 

 

This n’ That and the Wisdom of Frank Herbert

                             [thoughts from  ~burning woman~   ]

Let me see, now: there is work, rest, and somewhere in between, everything else, the jumble of life.  I’ve been very tired these last few weeks, mostly due to work, I realize that, but we also experience a deeper tiredness that comes from an accumulation of worn out time, year after year after year, “time passes” and to the observant, it produces a strange, disquieting litany of thoughts that run over the sands of the mind, like runnels of sand blown off the top of dunes and sliding down the sides to settle, but never for long, at the base.  The wind changes direction, comes again, picks up the sand and flings it into a sky already filled with brown dust.  Somewhere in that floating, parched wildness my thoughts float, forming a part of it, and somewhere further, as the future chooses, some of those thoughts will again form the uncertain and ever-changing top of another dune.  The wind “dies down” then the wind returns and the dance of thoughts begins anew.

I like the imagery.  Somewhere in a dimmed, distant past, beyond these times, in another galaxy, a different world, I existed on a desert planet.  I sense this more than I remember it.  The awareness of sand, not only as a symbol but as gritty reality, is as much a part of my life as is the beating of this Earthian heart.  I think of Frank Herbert’s masterpiece science fiction series, starting with the book, “Dune” – the sand and rock desert planet that would have remained unknown to the Empire were it not for the fact that it produced a substance known as “Spice” which prolonged life and allowed individuals to see through space and time.  All imperial space traffic depended on the spice, hence Dune, like Earth’s Middle East, was a planet constantly being fought over for its one and only resource, a resource without which the Empire could not hold.  Ah, but Frank Herbert was a great prophet and few realize it even today.   I will return to this thought.

Terrible, horrible man-made events are taking place all over this world.  Some of us, the ones lucky or unlucky enough to have been born with, or somehow developed, the sense of empathy, feel these things, perhaps too deeply.  They are more than troublesome, they are life-destroying.  Now thinking as an intelligent, sentient, being: is there a greater crime than that of destroying life?  I cannot think of one and yet it is a crime that Earthians have always indulged in fully, and continue to plunge themselves into in a never-ending cycle of bloody violence fed by greed, fear and lust.  A global Madness but since 99% of the asylum’s denizens are certifiable, then their madness is what passes as the norm.   

I should not be the one feeling tired from being immersed in this madness.  Surely every single ISSA (intelligent, sentient, self-aware) Earthian on this world should be equally tired, maybe even sick to death, of the bloodshed.  But no, those who are not actually cheering it on, or participating in it, are plunged so deeply into their own methods of denial that nothing disturbs them.  That remains utterly shocking to me.  Some whose conscience can still be tweaked with a shiver of awareness, blame their leaders, then return to their little, mindless motions, pretending to be alive.  

What I find so terribly sad isn’t so much the tens of thousands sacrificed daily to profit and pleasure, but the billions who are so brain dead, heart-cauterized and blind that they cannot honestly, without blame or self-justification, enter into the agony of earth and feel it burn.  Hoping it will not come to them, they ignore it and the closer it appears to their own doorstep, the deeper their head buries itself in the sands of oblivion. 

This brings me back to Frank Herbert.  Here are a few quotes I picked out of his third novel on “Dune” titled “Children of Dune.”

“If you believe certain words, you believe their hidden arguments.  When you believe something is right or wrong, true or false, you believe the assumptions in the words which express the arguments.  Such assumptions are often full of holes but remain most precious to the convinced.”

“Because of the one pointed Time awareness in which the conventional mind remains immersed, humans tend to think in a sequential, word oriented framework.  This mental trap produces very short-termed concepts of effectiveness and consequences, a condition of constant, unplanned, response to crisis.”

“To learn patience [in the Bene Gesserit Way] you must begin by recognizing the essential, raw instability of our universe.  We call nature – meaning this totality in all of its manifestations – the Ultimate Non-Absolute.”

“Time is a measure of space, just as a range-finder is a measure of space, but measuring locks us into the place we measure.”

“The malady of indifference is what destroys many things.”

“It is said that there is nothing firm, nothing balanced, nothing durable in all the universe – that nothing remains in its state, that each day, each hour, brings change.”

And finally, “Every judgment teeters on the brink of error.  To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous.  Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.”

The Interpreter

[thoughts from   ~burning woman~   by Sha’Tara]

Who wants to read this, hear this, I was thinking.  Then again, does it matter?  I need to write these thoughts or they will remain undigested in my mind and slowly poison it.

I’ve noticed over the last few years that when I sit with another person, or a few people, as they speak and as I listen, my eyes wander off, their line of sight moving deliberately away from the speaker.  They will lock onto some object and hold it.  I know it’s not the object they are observing but rather desperately trying to see that which is within, or behind, the object: that which is invisible, yet very much there.  This focusing effect is so powerful that often I notice everybody else turned and staring in the same direction I am.  “Nothing, nothing, I’m just listening,” I’ll say, because they seem convinced I am looking at something they all should be able to see.  If I told them I was looking at a chair leg shadow, or an upside-down book spine on a shelf, they’d think I was simply bored with the conversation. 

What is it that attracts the eyes thus?  I think I know now, and I have a new “name” or description for that invisible visitor: the Interpreter. 

When people speak, they speak of their lives; of events within their world; of information they have garnered, usually very recently, from the news media, or social media and supplying their personal interpretations of such.  Of course they are not speaking just words as if one were reading a book, or listening to a lecture.  They are telling a story that exposes who they really are.  Do they want to be heard on such a deep level?  Usually not.

Much of what takes place here is subconscious.  Usually we only listen to the sounds the speaker makes: her words.  Either we do not want to, or we do not know how, to listen to the real story.  Perhaps, we are afraid of entering into a space that will demand some personal commitment when we move past the hearing part to the listening.  Or we are afraid of the power to “read minds” as some call it, of intrusion, and we think, what if I’m wrong?

That’s where the Interpreter comes in.  

I don’t know if everyone is accompanied by an Interpreter or whether it comes only to those who seek to interact with their world compassionately.  I suspect the latter.  I suspect that most conversations remain on the purely physical level, with hearers focusing on the speaker, her tone of voice, her facial expressions, the movement of her hands, or entire body.  And of course there is often the sexual aspect coming into it, as the speaker morphs into a sex object to some.  Though usually vehemently denied, especially by women, that is often one of the effects the speaker wishes to achieve.  That’s the physically-centered Earthian species and no Interpreter needed on this level.

The Interpreter which the eyes desperately desire to bring into focus so it can be made a part of the usual façade cannot be so tricked.  If a hearer truly seeks to become a Listener, the Interpreter will take her into a sort of trance where the speaker’s true motives for speaking are exposed.  The speaker’s story is then heard on two levels: the shallow, normal word level, and the speaker’s life level. 

To listen this way is socially risky and one needs to learn to remain quiet as this very personal information is digested.  You can’t respond to the deep “stuff” directly, so you learn to respond to the surface expressions, keeping the deeper awareness for a later time… or for never, using it only for your own edification. 

That too, I file into the expanding realm of self-empowerment.  Unless it can be knowingly used for healing, or comforting, no one needs to hear what I learned of a speaker from the Interpreter.  It can remain on the observer level. 

 

For Lisa P – Something Else

[very brief thoughts from a tired   ~burning woman~   by Sha’Tara]

It’s 8:45 (at the moment), or 20:45 if you will and I’m too tired to really write anything coherent, but my mind won’t stop churning.  It’s like some crazed voice saying, “Write it, write it, write it!” and each inflection louder than the next.   

“What?”  Meaning, write what in particular?  As usual, unless I’m taken over by the muse to write fiction (what’s fiction again?) I have a dozen ideas floating in my mind from all the impressions I get of a world in turmoil, gone made, over the deep end and of a group-think mindset that generally speaking, doesn’t have a clue and couldn’t care less.

Do I want to talk about that?  No.  There’s enough of that everywhere I turn and tune. 

What then, my feelings about it all?  Why should my feelings matter so much they need to be superimposed over those of someone else?  They don’t, they really don’t.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this one life, and I’m old enough to know this, it’s that what I think and feel is just as important as what everybody else thinks and feels, and vice versa.  I’m just as special as everyone else, and so are my feelings. 

So, that’s me out of the way (like that’s even possible!) so what does the crazy voice want me to write about? 

I know, of course I know: it wants me to write about Something Else.  And I will, or I would, if only I had the language to express it but my languages only know Something Else as just that: something else.  Not even capitalized, just something else, so much so, I am leaving this “uncategorized.”

At least I can close with this: I know how you feel now, Lisa Palmer.