Thick, the Clouds

Bene --

Coming back from depression.  Again.

It's always a question of "How" for me - some people may well have a facility of pluck or discipline or grit that allows them to throw a stern, guiding hand over their individual selves and steer this way or that, independent of their emotions - and despite having tried feebly over the years to nurture such a facility in my Self - I lack such a power.  I only encounter something like it in the depths of depression, something that says, "No, all the rhymes and platitudes of others fail; I have the choice, to try to live or to take myself away."  And thereafter I only arise from those depths by accepting my weaknesses and nursing myself with positives - I live, I breathe, I am not among the worst off, I grow old but am still able to get by, I enjoy little but can still enjoy nonetheless.  So the first is somewhat on the order of the Existential, but the second is decidedly Epicurean!  And then, in my silly & superficial profession, I style myself Stoic:  taking as a base that there is ultimately one universe, that some to-us-more-or-less-magical basis informs it, that causation exists and eliminates mere chaos, that the order of things cares not a fig for human lives or frailties, and so on.

Reason, if at the base of things, is something we discover and apply, as best we can.  But being human, it is not the Reason of the Cosmos that I cultivate, but that of a human being -- social, individual, and imperfect like all palpable things.

Valete.

Avete -

Et nunc brevissime -

Among my blog-subscriptions is one that often shows old photos of Betty Page, in various states of attire.  A signal female model in a signal position in our recent cultural twists and turns, and yet another "pretty face".  In the un-simple confusion of biological life, being male involves being moved by "pretty faces" of various sorts. There is so much connected with that: how to sort it out? 

One way is this, to remember that "a pretty face" is a-dime-a-dozen in itself; that there is no "pretty" without some desire, some weakness on the part of the viewer; that more real than the impression that an image makes is the person (unknown for the most part) embodied within the source of the impression; that underneath said vision is a being, whether your superior or inferior or your more-or-less-peer, but certainly a creature with its own agenda; that we are morally bound to treat people well (if at all possible), and so to defer to her (or him or whatever); and, after all, that said creature is in the end just a messy-mixed-up-wonder of mucus, stomach acid, bacteria, noxious filth, and God knows what else! 

Such thoughts can push the superfluity of sexual excitement back a bit towards the proper indifference that we, as rational folks, should show towards strangers. 

Valete.

Not-so-Amazing, and Amazing, then Humbling...

Salve atque salvete! 

As a POST-post-scriptum to yesterday's dreary recital of self-pity and weary old dismay, let me say that it's remarkable and instructive what a difference food, fluoxetine and caffeine, and getting some work done, does for one's mood and outlook.  Reality doesn't change, but our readiness and attitude to engagement with it, our state, does.

And, in a conciliatory aside to the Christianos (qui tam plures sunt his in Civitatibus Unitiis), of which faith I have at times counted myself a provisional member, I expect that my petite and limited experience of mood-change is very similar to the long-term effect of being 'born again', a letting go of fear and helplessness and re-embarking on life, while trusting to God's control.  And this parallels what we gain from Stoicism - recognizing sad but necessary mortality, recognizing an underlying Universality in life and death all around us, and realizing that freedom is ultimately a humble thing, something that BELONGS to us in a simple and timeless way, and rarely a matter of what we would wish. 

Christianity is not a problem: Christians are good people, generally.  But fanatical Christianity is another story.  However, I'll let that be, at that point.

Recently I took up Goodman and Soni's book, "Rome's Last Citizen: Legacy of Cato the Younger", and heartily recommend it.  And I jotted this down in my notebook, from Lucan's Pharsalia (they don't identify the translation), speaking of oracles and other miracles:  

"Bound are we to the Gods; no voice we need;

They live in all our acts, although the shrines

Be silent...."

And from People magazine, of all things, I recorded a very good trans-belief-system quote from Muhammad Ali:

"Everything I do, I say to myself, 'Will God accept this?' Sleep is a rehearsal for death. One day you wake up and it's Judgment Day. So you do good deeds."

In a nutshell. 

And then, also in that People magazine, an amazing and humbling story - there are so many! - about Aimee Copeland, this young woman who lost legs and hands to disease, and has been reborn and re-equipped, in heart and in prosthetics!  It took me by surprise; horrible and then amazing.  A happy ending, by God! 

http://www.people.com/people/package/article/0,,21011736_21011374,00.html

And:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/aimee-copeland-new-hi-tech-prosthetic-hands-article-1.1347774

Worth pondering.  Valete.  

Feet Slipping on the Rocks

Salvete, qui legant -

How many of us recall being in water up to our necks and trying to find toe-purchase atop slimy, mossy lake stones?  That seems an apt metaphor for my mental and moral state just now.  Trying to get a grip, as it were. 

My life is not that of a gung-ho hot-shot nor even that of a giddy, myopic gas-bag.  My firmament in life is a slippery rock of absurdity - being myself too-much-that and not-enough-this, and so on.  The world of youthful competition and 24/7 performance-merit passed me by long ago, and it is one part of human nature with which I've never identified, except in fantasy. I've worked in my life - mostly for attorneys and their ilk, piddly stuff, but for people who DO live in the 24/7 giddiness - and seen them from a distance, occasionally felt the breeze of accomplishment myself.

But it's not me; that stuff is not forthcoming.  I remain out-of-it, strange, aside, "oddly conventional", and so on.  I balance atop the rock, liquid mossy, but that's as much as I can manage, it seems. 

So it is from this perpetual perspective of anomy that I face society's daily push-and-shove, and in particular these days the lightning and thunder spectacle of a Presidential election.  A decade ago I stopped asking "Why?" and accepted that people have their bestial norms and must act according to them:  a need to find enemies, a need to blame others, an inability to understand strangers, and (for oh-so-many) those very plain internal maps to winning, exploitation, and abuse of the "other".  This is nature; this is sadness for me, gaiety for them. 

There are a few lights in the dreariness: the Symbolic Sun (Invictus so far, if not truly immortal), friends, material fortune (to have a job, income, a home), and especially the boon of simple love, of wife and kids at home. 

So I'm still here.  Still trying to breathe and balance near the banks of Chaos River. 

Valete. 

P.S.  Yeah, post-commute-blues, feeling sorry for myself.  But this did help re-center me, and - as Jackie Gleason used to say - "Awaaay we go!" 

Writer Os Guinness

Salvete, qui legentes - 

(My Latin is so much bullshit!  I'm enamoured of it but am so ill-studied.  But that is quite beside the point today....) 

I want to mention a very good author, one whom I hold in respect -- while also, at times, arguing with in my lonesome journal:  Os Guinness, a man of reason and responsibility, a Christian writer who can bridge the gap (at least for me) between what is decent in the moral (and so, intellectual and political) stances of the American Left and Right.  It probably helps that he's not from around these parts to begin with. 

Amazon's bio of him lists this:

OS GUINNESS (DPhil, Oxford University) is an author and social critic. Born in China, he was educated in England at the Universities of London and Oxford. He moved to the United States in 1984....

Whether he likes it or not, I count him a proper Humanist, concerned for both real people as well as traditions of wisdom, and keen to penetrate partisan dishonesty.  I've read only two of his many books and recommend them both. 

First,  

• The Case for Civility: And Why Our Future Depends on It

but especially this one,

• Unspeakable: Facing Up to Evil in an Age of Genocide and Terror .

Need more folk like him. 

Valete.

Metaphysics from Iohannes

Salve, si aliquis has legit !

I am, as affiliations go, a Stoic -- at least, these days.  Have been since 2006, a decade or so.  I'm currently taking a course from the College of Stoic Philosophers (not accredited, I don't believe) whose classes are done over the Internet, are affordable, and are not bound up in the toils of professional academia.  Professional philosophers may sniff at this College (collection of colleagues) but it fulfills a purpose that the unaffordable and scholarly-professional schools do not address -- common people living their lives. 

Enough about the College. I'm grateful they've been around.  But I'm currently finishing up a quarter in which we've read on Stoic Physics, which -- for the Stoics -- was also Stoic Theology.  We're at the last section, and the subject is Piety. 

Looking over Erik the Scholarch's summation for this quarter, I find myself agreeing with most everything.  The one area where I can't agree with Erik and my mentor, Chris, is that of the Stoic God's Providence.  The Stoics had an interesting idea of God and of Providence:  They argued that while most of the universe is a system of causes (not a chain, not a domino effect), men are set apart, a section in them reserved for a minor sort of divine intelligence (all the universe being infused to greater or lesser degrees with a Cosmic Intelligence that orders things and creates movement and animation and consciousness).  What this does is set men (ie, people, humans, of both genders) apart as having a say-so in their own fates.  Fate rules all, and yet not finally, because men generally have the power to think and choose.  (Rather like Christianity, isn't it?  I'm sure there are endless parallels in other religions, too.) 

Where I part with Erik's and Chris's theistic notions is largely in this notion of Providence.  What does it mean?  I agree that God (as Universal Nature and as the divine Pneuma that pervades it) has provided for men and their survival as a species.  But I argue that that is about as far as it goes.  Erik and Chris might agree, but we part on the definition of Providence.  If the Stoic God (the divine Intelligence innate in the cosmos) were fully provident, we humans would have had a better nature to begin with; we would not be such a miserable, splintered, hostile, dissatisfied and ape-like species.  Erik's Providence goes only so far -- which is fine, actually, for Stoicism quite properly looks askance at most notions of Absolute Purity and Infinite this-and-that.  We have no Types, no Perfect God, no Perfect Other World; there is only what was, what is, and what comes to be. 

But then Erik quotes this, from our old drill instructor, Epictetus:

"For if we had any understanding, ought we not, both in public and in private, incessantly to sing and praise the Deity, and rehearse his benefits?" 

Well, yes and no.  We might, because we are small and insignificant, and incapable of the kind and degree of creation that Epictetus would have us thank God for.  But a question arises:  What's the purpose of this incessant praise?  Wasn't God doing what he is supposed to, that is, providing?  Moreover, isn't that Providence limited?  Yes, he's given us a bit for each, in terms of Intelligence, with which to affect Fate on our own; he's sort of 'deputized' us as Junior Gods, you might say.  But again, isn't that now our job, to be intelligent, to be good, to be so at the same time that we're being the particular kind of beasts that we (quite demonstrably) are?  God does his bit, and we do ours -- and that's the ticket.  God deserves praise only insofar as the entire World deserves praise, and most of the world is, to the Stoic, necessarily a thing Indifferent -- a world "not up to us" to control.  Moreover, indifference is the Stoic God's personal relation with us -- he's absent, except (again) as Universal Nature and as Our Individual Natures. 

Is this a big deal?  No, except that I can't join the Chorus of Theistic Stoics singing, "Praise God for this wonderful life!" when, no, it's not wonderful, but mixed and problematic.  Men and Women, Democrats and Republicans, Christians and Muslims?  War, serial killers, torture, disease, tooth-and-claw?  This may be a providence, a gift of animation, but it cannot be called "a wonderful life". 

"Thank you for the loan, God; I'll try to take care of it as I ought to, this Life, before you get it back from me."  I think that sums up the relationship quite well, "incessant praise" aside.   If you want God, read Thomas Paine and Camus and you will have a good beginning.  Stoicism is to be praised, I think, for putting all that -- earthly experience -- into perspective without resorting to either inflation of the Human Ego past its proper degree, or erecting Idols and demanding sacrificial victims, or simply sugar-coating the whole mess and ignoring evil.  Tie your shoelaces and save the drowning, as Thoreau advised; there's no need to get absurd in response to reality's absurdities. 

Vale, et aude sapere. 

Friday Blues: Not Too Unusual

Salvete qui legentes êstis -

Sometimes Friday is graced, not with Venus or Friya or Frigg, but with the proximity of freedom.  Not true freedom, for that is rare and has to do more with ability and virtue than with a lack of fetters, but the relative freedom of the coming weekend, Friday night, Saturday and Sunday, closing in a kind of eclipse on Sunday evening. 

But sometimes Friday is simply Fatigue-Day, Down-Day, Out-of-It-Day.  So today for me.  I am in a down cycle, emotionally, and trying to find fresh sources of oxygen (as it were).  What is to hand? 

First - Only what is "up to me", what I can do and control or affect.  This includes my mood, but not all of it, not my body or my neurology or my complement of good sleep.  Those things I can affect, but not command.  Even my state of mind, available to suggestion and even command from the "ruling faculty", can be an obstacle and a pitfall. 

But here memory is important, and an internal vigilance: 

1. To recall that your emotions and mood are susceptible to your Reason, that Reason is our gift from the Gods or from the Creation, that Great Source of Turmoil, with which to deal with its debris on earth. 
2. I can keep a mental eye open for the self-defeating, the undeservedly-self-castigating, the either-or-despairing, and other fallacious tricks of the mind that -- quite automatically, in my case -- cripple my little self and urge it to self-destruction. 
3. I can patch up what I can in the outside world -- whether at work, with my co-workers, with my family, with my friends and acquaintances, with problems financial -- patch things up with whatever I have of good humor and sensitivity and diligence.
4. I can above all watch out for Fear, for the Habit of Dread that infects me and my family, and recognize its imprimatur on my thoughts, on my disposition, on my judgments, and pull myself back when I lean too far into it, or reverse my opinion when I see its fell influence on an opinion.
5. I can look to the 'Engine Room' -- fuel supply, body status, metabolism -- and, quite literally, feed myself with an eye to decent fueling, decent material and nutritional input.  I can even improve the 'Guest Quarters' upstairs with a bit of fun food or a glass of wine, some luxury for the weary fool. 
6. And, in terms of what's up to me, I can cut myself a little slack, remember that I'm just a beastie trying to emulate the Gods, a mortal, "only human" as Robocop once said, a multicelled macro-animal gifted with Reason, and that the world is -- above all -- IM-perfect, not made okay, not made safe or good or complete or glorious, but rather dirty and dangerous, uncaring and paltry: as a termite with some Divinity in him, I can rebel against defeat and decline and dismay. 

There!  I'm better already!  Improved thanks to Lore, Thought, Reason, thyroxine, caffeine, Ensure© and some sandwich from Subway©, and neither should I forget the affable conversation and amusement afforded us by my boss.  Now to the rest of the day, and on to the weekend. 

Omnibus, valete bene.

(When I was 58 ...)

[An old draft entry that I just checked for errors and then inadvertently published for the very first time.  58 would make this ca. 2013 or so.  So view it as something 'historical'.]

Salvete, qui legunt -

I am 58 years old at this point. Compared to many, I've never had a life - but that's to be judged from which point of view? My default (or automatic) point of view is that I've had a simply defective life; that others have had the laurels, the striving, the "bling" of it all. Why do I even reflect on that? I am not the others; I am not "normal". If I am polite, it comes of fear - the need to manage people to avoid negative face - blame, shame and anger. If I read, it is because I search for some Bling of Knowledge that will validate what I am and save me the expense of hardship and self-discipline. Or I read for pleasure, to escape work, work, work....

From a more reflective point of view, I've simply had MY life - personal, inconsiderable, and more or less unique.  In these later years, I'm still trying to come to terms with my own ignorance, and with my own tendency (seen above) to wallow in facile self-criticism. 

Valete.

Contrary Old Nature Consuming Me

Salvete, quicumque legātis -

The one thing we know the Universe likes is friction. Collisions, mutations, heat, stress, movement of life, consumption of life by life - it seems to me the broad essential link is movement and conflict, whether it's at the sub-microscopic levels of nuclear particles, or among the rude little multicellular animals in a scummy pool, or between technologically endowed nations or movements throwing terror at each other, or in the collisions of asteroids, or in the super-nuclear super-heating of ineffably massive stars. Even light, as a body, collides and warms.

Speaking of mutation: According to my doctors, I've been visited by a nasty variety of it - squamous cell cancer. I have just turned 60 and now - bang - Nature plays the cancer card. More to come in terms of medical imaging and medical guesswork and treatment. The timing, of course, is less than ideal. A very bad way to begin Lunar New Year.

Once again - just as when I went to pieces in 2006, and then when someone near and dear to us ruined our finances that same year - events are crowding us out. My kids are still trying to find their niches in the new Republican slave economy, trying to become self-sufficient! I'm not expecting, at this point, that I will ever see my grandchildren. My 85-year-old mother (God keep her!) will quite possibly outlast me!

Still, what can you do? Death will come; it will take each down to dissolution. I have no particular fear of death, but I do have a lurking horror of the pain and suffering that may precede it. The final suffering will most likely be horribly intense and lonely, but I shan't dwell on that. That's all in the future, and beyond my control. (After all, I can hardly conjure up my death throes and tell them, "No; not that way! I won't have it!")

What is, after all, our one sure goal in life? Not conscious, not chosen, but entirely assured? Our death. Each man's arc of life ends up there, sooner or later, but assuredly. It's as natural as our facility of movement, our impulses, as universal as germination and birth.

Couple of Quotes

A couple of quotes from browsing today: 

This quote is one that we should all bear in mind - especially 'believers' who have not yet gone hardcore.  This is what we're seeing (along with a bloody sort of political theatre) with ISIS/ISIL in Iraq:

"... religious violence seldom limits itself to one target and expands to reach the maximum number of available victims."

(from 'The First Victims of the First Crusade', Feb 13, 2015 - by Susan Jacoby (New York Times)   http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/opinion/sunday/the-first-victims-of-the-first-crusade.html


On other topics, from Orson Welles:

"We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone."
 
And another:

"If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story." 

Valete. 

Felix est quem ....

Participating in our present age's revival of Stoicism, I have often had occasion to ask myself: How in the world can I, arguably an abject slave of pleasure and indolence, a rattle-headed, timid, and puerile old do-nothing, how can I of all people call myself a Stoic? For many is the time that my own native scrupulousness has argued that I was a hypocrite to do so while I remained so full of petty defects and so short on decisive willpower; and many is the time that I've been tempted to just jump ship and go native, to simply devote myself to whatever overpowering pleasure I can find.

Well, I haven't jumped ship. In fact, you might say that I'm still aboard, swabbing the deck. I haven't given up because I remember (a) that Nature is anything but simple, anything but black and white - that almost nothing is perfect or absolute; (b) that half a man is better than none, and an educated half-a-man may well be better still; and (c) that God has given me a certain problem to work on (i.e., myself), unknown to others, and that therein I have my work cut out for me.

And there's another rationalization that I think has substantial weight to it: (d) that "Felix quem faciunt aliena pericula cautum" (which I read as: "Happy is he whom other people's dangers make cautious"). In other words, why not improve oneself?  Moreover, even if I am not living a Cynic's life, homeless on the street, even if am neither Saintly nor Sagely, even if I cannot BE perfect, I can at least participate in the transmission of this most useful philosophy and way of life. Helping others to learn and understand how to live, in the course of living my own transient, microscopic little life, this benefits them, myself, and the world at large.

We are all aliens and strangers, and each comprises a little hidden world of his or her own. If we recuse absolutism and fanaticism and set about living decent lives, in toleration if not in real harmony, then the good of one can rub off on the good of another.  In fact, the more that people are decent -- or better yet, virtuous -- the more lives and souls can be spared violence or the guilt of violence. Apply your Stoicism, apply your virtues, and try to live well. It's what we're meant to do.

Salvete, qui legunt -

At present I find myself with three blogs, in effect - this one on Blogger here, http://iohannkn.blogspot.com/;   my Wordpress one http://iohannkn.wordpress.com/  (a left-over from Microsoft's personal pages days);   and now a shared one, the Redwood Stoa site at http://redwoodstoa.wordpress.com/, where I can post as "the Redwood Stoa" along with my co-Stoics.  I'm wondering if I can link all three - the software side of all this, even the user interface side, I usually find somewhat baffling (interface and utility expectations frustrated), so I'll have to poke around a bit.  The alternative is to dump one of the two personal ones. 

When next I post, I want to look at my son's personal Deus ex Machina, "The Four Agreements" of Don Miguel Ruiz, a self-help book with a lot of Stoic parallels. 

Vale valeteque.