theNakedAtheist

And at late-meal tonight, fortune cookies. Mine read:

“Guide yourself accordionly”

The lessons start tomorrow.

First time I came upon a snake in the wild, I thought it was dead; I wasn't afraid. It wasn't dead.

Second time I saw a snake in the wild I was indeed afraid. Enraptured, but frightened stiff. It slowly coiled out of sight, leaving me, and I was frightened and powerless to stop it.

Oh let the man be alone. Let him—if nothing else—possess himself in silence. For in the cogged and running vessels of the city, there is only noise, only the lifeless static, ever-going hupala of white mentality: meaningless, once a man dies. Meaningless because it has sold out his life while he lived. And when he is dead, when silence itself has been silenced, there is nothing not even a blackness, not even oblivion. It is only the quite final, the quite-the-end.

For life is dying, dying on us, going out. Life, that is only for a time, before the spark is extinguished, hailstorms of death knock it out. No God, no Buddah, can ever put back life, once it has been forced out. Death is the undone; it cannot itself be un-undone.

So our cities, which are not life, which are the un-life, they drain us out, they kill us, and never will they give us a gulp of our own life-throb, nothing more than a parched skeleton-sip.

So let, I say, let the man be alone—at least awhile. Let him be wordless, if only awhile. Soon he will die and will have lost his chance.

And the only one a man gets.

Sing me your siren song!
Sing me your siren song!
Oh sing me your siren song—sing!
Sing all day long!

When the man and the woman are flames
flames licking raptuously at each other
licking of the loins, flame-licking
at the wild, dark center

Ah for the blindness of a flower in spring!

I like this poem of mine:

Swish
I know now, know now, the final swish
that moves my life so slowly—oh so slowly—
on its way. Is a swish, a swish of the secret
silver contract made with the moon
by a people I wasn't even born yet.

But the contract is mine
as much in turn it was theirs.
And I will do my duty—even if it means
following mapless a sky I do not know,
whose stars are strange to me.

But follow I will as I have to
in the trip of life that is hardly a trip,
hardly a going anywhere or a getting
to any particular place on time—
even if there were maps at every station.

So I trace after the swish
the sweep of the moon; its endless charting
cycleless, lineless, only a turning
from something to something.

I don't mean to always condemn Bertrand Russell. He is, after all, a very wise man, has written much truth. Here is something from Marriage & Morals:

The taboo against nakedness is an obstacle to a decent attitude on the subject of sex. Where young children are concerned, this is now recognized by many people. It is good for children to see each other and their parents naked whenever it so happens naturally. There will be a short period, probably at about three years old, when the child in interested in the difference between his father and his mother, and compares them with the differences between himself and his sister, but this period is soon over, and after this he takes no more interest in nudity than in clothes. So long as parents are unwilling to be seen naked by their children, the children will necessarily have a sense that there is a mystery, and having that sense they will become prurient and indecent. There is only one way to avoid indecency, and that is to avoid mystery. There are also many important grounds of health in favor of nudity in suitable circumstances, such as out of doors in sunny weather. Sunshine on the bare skin has an exceedingly health-giving effect. Moreover, anyone who has watched children running about in the open air without clothes must have been struck by the fact that they hold themselves much better and move more freely and more gracefully than when they are dressed. The same thing is true of grown-up people. The proper place for nudity is out of doors in the sunshine and in the water. If our conventions allowed of this, it would soon cease to make any sexual appeal; we should all hold ourselves better, we should be healthier from the contact of air and sun with the skin, and our standards of beauty would more nearly coincide with standards of health, since they would concern themselves with the body and its carriage, not only with the face. In this respect the practice of the Greeks was to be commended.

And we commend you, Mr. Russell . . . at least on this subject.

“The problem with you is that you wear your heart on your sleeve.”

“You wear yours in your briefcase.”

Since reason is based on experience, and experience has largely been destroyed, can reason now be trusted?

Even if we knew the nature of all our problems, we couldn't solve them—only change them. Then we would have new problems that we didn't understand. A century passes while we come to understand them, but still we can't solve them—again, only change them.

For this is the way it has been with us. We don't solve problems—we change them to new problems. It is a vicious cycle, a Pandora's box, for the new problems are always somehow more numerous than the old ones, and more complicated. Things seem to grow gradually worse and more complex the more we solve problems. For we don't solve them, only change them.

How do we get out? How?

I cannot repeat enough that, concerning the actual worthwhile-ness of human life, I believe very much (every day am more sure of it) that the history of civilization is roughly the history of the decline of mankind.

It is not that I hate civilization—I don't. Today we couldn't survive without it, we must have it, bear it. But it is still basicly an evil, and the brother of evil. That we can't survive without it only points clearly the fact that the history of its rise is the history of our demise as fully alive human beings. Perhaps we can go a step deeper and pin the blame on reason—yes, reason! For man's increasing intellectual sophistication continually leads directly to increasing societal sophistication.

Acts of new vision, of bright original thought, seem to lead inevitably to new more intricate chains jailing us. Deeper locked in the civilized cage.

How to get out. I wish I knew. So far reason has only seemed to result, eventually, in more deeply entrapping us. So that to hold out that more reason is still somehow the answer is rather naive, unjustified by any evidence we have. Reason can solve all kinds of “technical” problems: how to eliminate small pox; but always its larger more indirect general effect is to further trap us and alienate us from life.

What we must realize is that it is our reason, not our lack of reason, our rationality not our irrationality, that is the real agent responsible for injustice and stupidity and pig-headedness in the world.

It is all so typical to put the blame on those unenlightened who, rather than being ruled by reason allow themselves to be ruled by their “emotions” and “physical desires”. But it's about time this is seen as hogwash. Hogwash it is.

(And we are the hogs doing the washing.)

Man is a rational creature. That is his problem. He listens to his head more than to his body. His head forces its ideas onto his body. And the ideas it forces are the ideas it's been taught. And the society that teaches these ideas is very much built upon the ideas that it teaches.

Between them, they are taking us in the wrong direction, and have been. Nonetheless, the ideas that corrupt a society at a given time are rational. Reached—at least reachable—by reason. Reason that takes into account circumstances and human experience.

We would like to be able to say, of course, that people like Hitler and Stalin and Idi Amin were irrational—but it is just self-delusion on our part. Their behavior may appear erratic, their reasoning (if we refuse to see it from anything but the point of view of our particular outlook) may appear senseless—but the truth is Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin were all quite rational men, no doubt as rational as Wilson, FDR, and Nixon. We think the present-day Russian leaders somehow less rational than us in insisting on totalitarian control over ideas and speech. It may be they are wrong and we are right, but the truth of such a matter is not as logically determinable a thing as the correct move in a given chess position. The Russians may after all be right in their belief that freedoms must be curtailed if a fully communist society is to be achieved. And who can be sure that they are wrong that such a communist society can never be, so long as the spectre of a capitalist one hangs over any portion of the world. If they are right that capitalism is a corrupting and killing disease, who can be safe till it is eradicated? Is it not the duty of everyone to fight pestilences, even remote ones?

Our problem is reason, not the lack of reason: how can it not be obvious. Reason is our cage.

But what can we do about it—disclaim it? Turn against it?

Obviously that won't do. Rather than an end to reason, we'd have a stabilization: present reason. That is, common reason would jump on us like an ox—even more than it does today. Substituting a static reason for a dynamic but chaining one does little good, no good at all in fact.

What we need is a drastic change in our basic philosophy. We need to reason, but not blindly without mind to the nature of reason itself. We need, instead, reason that is self-conscious, that doesn't ignore itself as an entity. A new rationality with a healthy distaste for rationality itself.

Reason is evil unless it is complete. But reason can never quite be complete.

For we are fallen: bodies broken in twain. Until the twain meet again—well. . . maybe reason can't ever help. Even if we all knew the problem—and the answer—what could we do? Could we do anything?

I don't know; but it would be a worthwhile position to be in. There is always hope.

In the early 1960's or late 1950's a new trend of permissive. love-based “open” classrooms had it beginning. It replaced the old classroom in which strict discipline and the pressure of competition dominated all. By 1970 or so the switchover had been complete: a new type of enjoyable, fun-oriented education had replaced the older “competitive” type, a sort of parallel to our society's new orientation away from competitiveness towards a sort of do-your-own-thing enjoyment-based ethic.

Theory: that perhaps it was the being caught in the switch-over from closed, competitive classrooms in younger grades and open freedom-oriented classrooms in older grades that produced that occurrence known as the youth rebellion of the 60's.

We know of course the importance of Vietnam and racial inequality, but much of the anti-capitalistic and consumer-oriented economy feeling perhaps is due to students undergoing in school the sudden sudden switch from one form of classroom to the other. It was just that that made them tend to be radical—for society as a whole, especially in the way it educated them—suddenly deprived them of the order they had at first been exposed. Result: then had, they realized, to look elsewhere (within themselves) for the order they felt lacking.

The present generation of school children we need not expect to be radical; or radically-tended, we can expect. For not having been exposed to a tighter order in the first place, it is unlikely they will feel something missing in that respect. They should, we can feel safe, fit well into our pleasure-oriented society and economic system.

And yet, since this system leaves such an emptiness in life, we can expect a continued religious revival. And religion, as we know, is a “safe” outlet for frustrations and failings.

Opiate of the people? —perhaps Marx is still right.

But no—the opiate is our consumer-pleasure-oriented economy. That is the opiate. Religion is a medicine to heal us from the opiate, from the widespread degradation of life. Without religion, life is not worth living.

I want to change that. I want to put God out of business, make Him unnecessary.

And the world about him as he journeyed through life was a ceaseless washing machine of new, sparkling experience. Cycling and twisting in the cosmos outside him, like new-colored fabrics tumbling always tumbling in the machine-face.

The hot pulsing cerebral blood: it is the antipode of physical sexuality, and replaces it in modern humans.

Body-bound, we are body-bound. We must shake our hair at the wind.

The female cry. Dumb, blind cries.

Let us have no more of white apples. Adam, Eve, do you hear?

White nipples? That is another matter—but not paper-white, please!

The sheer blackness of being, and of breathing, once the head has been silenced—at least for the night.

You must blacken cognition: the ideas, pre-notions, all the wire mesh of consciousness: out , out of yourself. Just be there, all-aware, thoughtless, notionless, though not motionless. And as the man-beast thing clasps at you, woman, experience what you experience, not stamping a machine-order or direction or motive onto things, onto him, in your mind. There are his hips—his lips—a strange orifice into the animal laid low. Breath enters and goes from him—it is . . . is incomprehensible! Unknown—unknowable—all so strange, so. . . . Why ought it to have reason—strange how the breath goes in and out of him, feeds him his living motion, and emotion—air-breathing animal.

All this you experience in him, girl, as he clutches you, blind and darkly. But without the words, woman, the words: ideas, notions, mental talking. All with the black oblivion of the head. This, girl, this is of the things you must be out to learn.

The mind—you are wrong mister—the mind doesn't free you; except it has already chained you.