Manna

Exodus 16:11-17
And the Lord said to Moses: "I have heard the murmurings of the Isrealites. Speak to them saying 'At twilight you shall eat meat and in the morning you shall have your fill of bread, and you shall know that I am the Lord your God.' "And it happened in the evening that the quail came up and covered the camp, and in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. And the layer of dew lifted, and look, on the surface of the wilderness -stuff fine, flakey, fine as frost on the ground. And the Isrealites saw and said to each other, "Man hu, What is it? " for they did not know what it was. And Moses said to them, "It is the bread that the Lord has given you as food. This is the thing that the Lord has charged: "Gather from it each man according to what he must eat, an omer to a head, the number of persons among you, each man for those in his tent you shall take.' " And the Isrealites did thus, and they gathered, some more,some less.

16: 19-21
And Moses said to them " let no man leave over from it till morning." But they did not heed Moses and some men left over from it till morning, and it bred worms and stank, and Moses was furious with them. And they gathered it morning after morning every man according to what he must eat, and when the sun grew hot, it melted.

Translated By Robert Alter

"Europe Central" William T. Vollmann

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From “Europe Central”
Chapter title Opus 110

“In 1946... Comrade Zhdanov .. announced to the Leningrad Union of Soviet writers: Leninism proceeds from the fact that our literature cannot be politically indifferent, cannot be "art for art's sake". They got quiet then; they knew what was coming. In truth the only wonder was that it hadn't come sooner... Folding his arms across his massive breast like one of our KV tanks, Comrade Zhdanov forthwith demanded that there be no further deviation from the task at hand on the literary front - namely to create art to light the way with a searchlight.

P 625
____________________________________
(Shostakovich encountering Rabbi Luria in a dream)

Somehow he knew this individual was Comrade Luria and that Comrade Luria was angry with him.

"Because you betrayed us all with that facile Seventh Symphony which wears its meaning on its chest like an idiotic medal…"
"Well, well, well, then I must beg you to forgive me, replied Shostakovich, almost asphyxiated by dreaming dread. You see I wanted to inspire people, and- well I mean to say I though I could make myself useful-"
"Useful? Said Comrade Luria in a rage. You know all to well that utility’s the merest pimp for whom true art gets prostituted! Moreover…. He took a step closer. Shostakovich trembled. …Moreover, It’s high time we talked about form. Another step. And now Shostavovich was touched by the odor of burned hair.
I’m sure you’ve noticed, continued Comrade Luria, how much aestheticians like to prate about the impotence of form without content or content without form. But in music, perfect form and content together can remain as stillborn as a law without the seal of Heaven upon it. There has to be emotion….
"Excuse me, excuse me; but isn’t emotion the same as, er, content in this case? Naturally I understand that it is not equivalent to form no matter what our social realists preach. For example in the right hands an allegro in a major key can convey anything, not just happiness –
"Exactly, said Comrade Luria, taking another step.
"……Thank you. But, if I may ask, what is musical content if not the feeling of the music?
Comrade Luria smiled, took three more rapid steps and touched him.
That touch! It was like entering a darkened room and suddenly getting assaulted by soft silent, hideous moths whose scales flaked off as they brushed in their dozens across nose, forehead, cheek and eyes, dryly flapping and dying, blindly disintegrating, polluting, attacking, asphyxiating. ……

Comrade Luria was a charred skeleton. Comrade Luria knowingly said: "After somebody’s been cremated (no matter weather he was living or dead), his form’s his image in your memory. His feeling, his emotional value if you will, is nothing more or less than the feeling you have when you remember him. So what is his content?
"I don’t know.
Is it a handful of ash? Demanded Comrade Luria, breathing in Shostakovich’s face that terrible breath which stank of roasted flesh.
"No, no-
What’s your content?
"I….I have no content; I’m empty.
"Then say so in your music.

P. 629, 630.

Cat's Cradle ( Bokonon's Calypsos)

"I wanted all things
To seem to make some sense,
So we could all be happy, yes,
Instead of tense.
And I made up lies
So they all fit nice
And I made this sad world
A par-a-dise"

"Cat's Cradle" p. 157 Kurt Vonnegut

King Law

"But where says some is the King of America? I'll tell you Friend,he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Britain. Yet that we not appear to be defective even in earthly honors, let a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth placed on the divine law, the word of God; let a crown be placed theron, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America THE LAW IS KING."

Thomas Paine
"Common Sense"
Published 1776

Normality and the Crowd

"The Feminine in Fairy Tales" Marie-Louise Von Franz

"At the beginning of Nazism in Germany I was several times asked by Germans in what respect they were abnormal, for though they were unable to accept Nazism, not doing so made them doubt their own normality. Those who stuck to their instinctive reactions and in a higher sense, remained on the right path,

yet fell into misery and complete disaster. They were impressed by the collective impulse though they were right in not joining the collective movement. In that case misery fell upon people who had done the right thing."
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Copyright 1972
1993 Shamballa Press Edition
Page 36

The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles

"These temporizing proceedings (of ours) may to some seeme too charitable, to such a daily daring trecherous people: to others not pleasing,that we washed not the ground with their blouds, nor shewed such strange inventions in mangling murdering, ransacking,and destroying (as did the Spanyards) the simple bodies of such ignorant soules..."

The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles:
With the Names of the Adventurers, Planters, and Governours From Their First Beginning Ano: 1584. To This Present 1624. With the Procedings of Those Severall Colonies and the Accidents That Befell Them in All Their Journyes and Discoveries. Also the Maps and Descriptions of All Those Countryes, Their Commodities, People, Government, Customes, and Religion Yet Knowne. Divided Into Sixe Bookes. By Captaine Iohn Smith, Sometymes Governour in Those Countryes & Admirall of New England.
London: Printed by I.D. and I.H. for Michael Sparkes, 1624.

FULL TEXT LINK

Saul Bellow:"Herzog"

Saul Bellow

Herzog ruminations:

"Considering his entire life, he realized he had mismanaged everything - everything. His life was, as the phrase goes, ruined. But since it had not been much to begin with, there was not much to grieve about. Thinking, on the malodorous sofa, of the centuries, the ninteenth, the sixteenth, the eighteenth, he turned up, from the last, a saying that he liked:
Grief, Sir, is a species of idleness."

-"Herzog" Pgs 5,6

"Dear Dr. Shrodinger, in "What is Life" you say that in nature only man hesitates to cause pain. As destruction is the master- method by which evolution produces new types, the reluctance to cause pain may express a human will to obstruct natural law..... In your remarks on entropy... how the organism maintains itself against death- in your words, against thermodynamic equilibrium....Being an unstable organization of matter, the body threatens to rush away from us. It leaves. It is real. It! Not we! Not I! ....
To have a human life and also an inhuman life....To bite, to swallow and at the same time pity your food. To have sentiment. at the same time to behave brutally. It has been suggested ( and why not!) that the reluctance to cause pain is actually an extreme form, a delicious form of sensuality, and that we increase the luxuries of pain by the injection of a moral pathos. Thus working both sides of the street. "

From one of Moses E. Herzog's letters written in the head but never mailed in "Herzog"- pgs 194,195.

Empire

Exerpt from a review of "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic"
by Chalmers Johnson. Review by Jonathan Freedland in the June 14, New York Review of Books

"Americans have never constructed colonies abroad.(?) Oh, but they have, he says; it's just that Americans are blind to them. America is an "empire of bases," he writes, with a network of vast, hardened military encampments across the earth, each one a match for any Roman or Raj outpost. Official figures speak of 737 US military bases in foreign countries, adding up to an armed American presence, whether large or small, in 132 of the 190 member states of the United Nations.
Johnson reckons the number is actually higher, if one includes those bases about which the Pentagon is coy. The 2005 Base Structure Report omits to mention, for example, garrisons in Kosovo, as well as bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan, even though it is well known that the US established a vast presence in both the Persian Gulf and Central Asia after September 11. (Admittedly, the US was evicted from its base in Uzbekistan in 2005.) Nor does the Pentagon ledger include the extensive military and espionage installations it maintains in Britain, estimated to be worth some $5 billion, since these are nominally facilities of the Royal Air Force. "If there were an honest account, the actual size of our military empire would probably top 1,000 different bases overseas, but no-one—possibly not even the Pentagon —knows the exact number for sure," writes Johnson. Intriguingly, he notes that the thirty-eight large and medium-sized US facilities around the world, mostly air and naval bases, match almost exactly both the thirty-six naval bases and army garrisons Britain maintained at its imperial peak in 1898 and the thirty-seven major sites used by the Romans to police the empire from Britannia to Egypt, Hispania to Armenia in 117 AD. "Perhaps," muses Johnson, "the optimum number of major citadels and fortresses for an imperialist aspiring to dominate the world is somewhere between thirty-five and forty."

Par Lagerkvist: "The Sibyl"

"In a little house on the mountain slopes above Delphi lived an old women and her witless son. The house consisted of a single room; one wall was the mountainside itself, and always dripped with moisture. It was not really a house at all but a ramshackle hut which the herdsmen had built for themselves. It stood alone away up in the wild mountain, high above the the buildings of the city and the sacred precincts of the temple. The woman seldom left the house, her son never. He sat within, in the half light, smiling to himself as he had always done; he was now well into middle age and his lank hair had begun to turn gray. But his face was untouched; it was as it had always been, without any real features in its beardless, downy childishness, only that queer perpetual smile. The old women's face was furrowed and austere, and swarthy, as if it had been touched by fire, her eyes had the look of eyes that have seen god."

'The Sibyl' Par Lagerkvist 1956 trans. Naomi Walford

"Radical Hope: Ethics in a Time of Cultural Devestation": Jonathan Lear

"Plenty Coups refused to speak of his life after the passing of the buffalo, so that his story seems broken off, leaving many years unaccounted for. "I have not told you half of what happened while I was young" he said when urged to go on. "I can think back and tell you much more of war and horse stealing. But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened. There was little singing anywhere. Besides," he added sorrowfully, " you know that part of my life as well as I do. You saw what happened to us after the buffalo went away. "

- from 'Radical Hope.' here Lear quotes Plenty Coups as recounted in "Plenty Coups: Chief of the Crows" by Frank B. Linderman, University of Nebraska Press 1962

Process and Reality

" The wisdom of subjective aim prehends every actuality for what it can be in such a perfected system - its sufferings, its sorrows, its failures, its triumphs, its immediacies of joy - woven by rightness of feeling into the harmony of the universal feeling, which is always immediate, always many, always one, always with novel advance moving onward and never perishing. The revolts of destructive evil, purely self regarding, are dismissed into the triviality of merely individual facts; and yet the good they did achieve in individual joy, in individual sorrow,in the introduction of needed contrast, is yet saved by its relation to the completed whole. The image- and it is but an image- under which this operative growth of God's nature is best conceived is that of a tender care that nothing be lost.

The consequent nature of God is his judgment on the world. He saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgement of tenderness which loses nothing which can be saved. It is the judgement of a wisdom which uses that what in the temporal world is mere wreckage"

From "Process and Reality" pg. 407-408

Published 1929

Bad Coffee

"People who drink coffee are ...insane and possessed,and what is worse, willing to be posessed. Most people in asylums drink coffee. If you let them stop drinking it they would gain enough equanimity to leave. But no, they don't stop. In fact they drink more and more, and they get crazier and crazier. They're dehumanized with every single goddamned drop, and although they sense it, they are like lemmings, or buffalo who jump off cliffs. People drink coffee and it makes them insane."

"Must you drink coffee? Why not cocoa, tea, cola tea, mate, yoco infusion or guarana? Why caffeine? Why not theobromine or theophylline ? ....You know what they used to put in ground coffee to bulk it up?.. Roots, rocks, baked horse liver, clays, ground peanut shells, copra, sisal, feathers and pig shit. And no one knew. How would they have known? They were already Hogarthian zombies who professed allegience to.. to what? To a king? To a messiah? To a belief? To what? To what? Not even a false messiah or a usurping pretender, not even to a wrong idea or a hypnotic creed. But to a bean, a bean, a bean, bean, bean, bean!"

Exerpt from one of many coffee rants in "Memoirs From Antproof Case" by Mark Helprin p 215, 216

Navajo Creation Story 5th stage

"At the Dawn of the arrival of early humanlike beings in the fifth world, they find themselves on an island surrounded by water after travelling through a reed to escape a flood of water in the fourth world. In this world, the final human form is quickly completed, and many types of animals begin to appear. Coyote, howling at the top under the arch, is an important figure in Dine' legend. He appears around this time and influences a lot of what happens at this early stage, such as the placement of the stars."

Julie Newdoll

The New World

His disciples said to him, "When will....the new world come ?"

He said to them, "What you look forward to has already come, but you do not recognize it."

His disciples said to him, "When will the kingdom come?"
He said to them, "It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying , 'Here it is' or 'There it is.' Rather, the Father's kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and men don't see it."

-The Gospel of Thomas 42.7 -51.18, in NHL 123-130

For background on Elaine Pagels and the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts, see THIS.

de lynn in paradise

Had to try and send this quick list i wrote days ago while I have the chance as another storm is coming in, the streets are flooding and the power keeps going out but... of all things to stop and make you think...today I saw a man die and his last words were...'the snorkeling is great here' then back under the water he went...
He was large and elderly but was enjoying his Cruise and time with family through these tropical parts and just had a heart attack while under water snorkeling. The whole island and all of us in proximity and those that did CPR are all reeling but comforted by his last words and the good time he was having. But it has reminded us all of friends and family that are far away so I wanted to send my love and remind you all that you are missed, and you should take that vacation you have been thinking about NOW! Note to self= no defibrillators or oxygen on dive boats down here...or probably anywhere near by...
More on diving and life lessons later but here are some previous random thoughts...
?<# Don't be surprised if your barefoot Island Doctor looks like a mix between Jimmy Buffet and Weird Al and offers no apology for your 7hour wait but informs you of all the island gossip and inbreeding that he blames for all the mental illness on the island, tells you that Island woman are the downfall of every good man...all while puffing on a cigarette. I think he lost his shaker of salt. A question in the local pub on 'quiz night' is 'how many countries can the Island Dr. still practice in?' the answer was two, i fell off my chair laughing. I felt most like Harpo Marx while 'acting out' that I am an experienced horseback rider...can't you picture me playing 'charades' all around the stable riding an invisible pony? Telling someone you don't speak Spanish will not stop the 3 hours of explanations about all the trees, plants, fruits, animals, insects in sight, so act appreciative. You can put 5 people on one motorcycle, babies hang off to the side. Coca Cola is the only true Super Power. A dorm room may only cost 5 dollars but your pizza is still $12 and a smoothie is $5= bring more money. Two types of divers/ those that pee in their wetsuits and those that admit to peeing in their wetsuits. Guess which one I am? I have now included this information during introductions. Can't get a good cup of coffee/ only Nescafe on the whole island of Utila / Central America what? Fruit and vegetables are hard if not impossible to find / Tropical Island what? Sometimes I pretend, unsuccessfully, not to speak English to avoid the frustration of 4hours of stories in Island accents that are too think to understand / English what? Avoid hearing all nightmare dive stories until after you swim with the sharks, dolphins and whales...phew...just made that one. Water Taxis are just cooler...well, because, they are Water Taxis. Speedos are alive and well just in case you were wondering. Just because you have paid for a private boat charter around the Island doesn't mean your captain wont stop to talk to all the pretty girls, visit friends, make a dozen phone calls and drink a dozen beers. Pretending to think I look around 25yrs old, does not make us better friends. Sometimes it's good to make friends with the local 'tough guy, but sometimes it's scarey to be friends with the local 'tough guy'/ he killed the shark that tried to attack him, cut him open and got his regulator back. I now have a 'diver's tan' which looks like I am wearing a 'white suit' at all times... No one gets their money back because it's called a 'fishing trip' not a 'catching trip'... An elderly man in a speedo, with his mullet in corn rows, is just...well, I don't know what that is... My favorite custom/ when you ask for your bill they ask you how many beers you have had (you are asking me? but i am the one who has been drinking...) or how many nights did you stay at the Hotel, I am not sure, I was the one asleep. Washing and drying your own clothes in 95% humidity is just funny... I am repeatedly asked how I was talked into eating termites, but I guess I keep forgetting to mention that my jungle guide's name was Darwin...it was an obvious choice. It's hard to leave a small tropical Island...literally, it's hard to leave...help... love to all, delynn speaking little Spanish since 1967

Carlos Marighella: ""Handbook of Urban Guerrilla Warfare"

Marighella was the strategic inspiration for urban insurgencies that have since mutated into toda's mideast terrorist tactics. He was killed by Brazilian police in 1969. The following is quoted in "The Battle for Algeria" from his "Handbook for Urban Warfare"-s

"It is necessary to turn political crisis into armed conflict by performing violent actions that will force those in power to transform the political situation of the country into a military situation. That will alienate the masses, who, from then on, will revolt against the army and the police and blame them for this state of thingsThe government can only intensify its repression thus making the life of its citizens harder than ever... The population will refuse to collaborate with the authorities, so that the latter will find the only solution to their problems lies in having recourse to the actual physical liquidation of their opponents. The political situation of the country will become a military situation..."

The book

Hannah Arendt from ' The Origins of Totalitarianism'

" While totalalitarian regimes are thus resolutely and cynically emptying the world of the only thing that makes sense to the utilitarian expectations of common sense, they impose upon it at the same time a kind of supersense which the ideologies actually always meant when they pretended to have found the key to history or the solution to the riddles of the universe.[ ] Ideologies are harmless, uncritical, and arbitrary opinions only as long as they are not believed in seriously. Once their claim to total validity is taken literally they become the nuclei of logical systems in which, as in the systems of paranoiacs, everything follows comphrehnsively, even compulsorily once the first premise is accepted. The insanity of such systems lies not only in their first premise but in the very logicality with which they are constructed. The curious logicality of all isms, their simple minded trust in the salvation value of stubborn devotion without regard for specific varying factors, already harbors the first germ of totalitarian contempt for reality and factuality."

Hannah Arendt booklist Here