robinturner | Another thought on re-watching Buffy

From:

cassielsander.livejournal.com

I really don't know why, but a goat-head just works well for me, from the Marvel Comics version of Baphomet through Altered States and beyond.

Snake heads are so, I don't know. Classist.

Maybe we just figure all those goats we sacrificed to Azazel are going to take their vengeance one day.

From:

solri.livejournal.com

A friend of mine back in the 1970s had two goats. The female was the sweetest thing ever. The male hit adolescence and went all Satanic—he'd stare at you balefully with his yellow eyes, an effect accentuated by the fact that he'd taken to drinking his own urine. The look said, "You may stop me eating the washing, mortal, but I shall own your soul for an eternity of torment." But of course, when he actually did eat the washing, that kind of ruined the Satanic effect.

From:

hfx-ben.livejournal.com

What do most folk think of in association with "goose".

Me? I think of nasty, cussed, confrontational, aggressive, violent ... so far as I can tell the only way to fight off a goose is to kill it with a good swift kick to the chest.

So, with that as context ... on what basis do moderns know goats?

I'm going to generalize here: because moderns have such an insanely constrained knowledge of material reality almost nothing makes sense to them except the world of TV sit-coms.

If it weren't for sd$sm+$p `k~s sd^a0@d2 and *#n(d!l I'd have moved to live with the Bedoin years ago. (Because the natives of Kham, eastern Tibet, are out of reach.

When pondering things of daily life we per force need to remind ourselves that we're dealing with people who are massively alienated from the stuff of sanity.

So ... not likely someone will have any experiential basis for relating to "goat-like" ... except the distorted echoes of ancient culture, ramified and filtered through consummer brain-washing.

BTW: If you haven't already, read Robert Graves' "White Goddess". Not quite the Golden Bough, but a close 2nd.

From:

solri.livejournal.com

I read The White Goddess when I was a teenager, but don't remember much of it, and what I do remember, I get mixed up with The Lost Gods of England, which I read about the same time. I also recommend Peter Redgrove's The Black Goddess, which came put some time in the '80s—the title is a deliberate reference to Graves' work.

From:

hfx-ben.livejournal.com

I went on a big kick after my military sting (Chile, projection of power, destabilizing other governments, that shiet) trying to figure out "where EU culture went wrong". I actually didn't find anything to even come up with a pet theory. Except maybe scape-goating, which seems endemic, but I suspect that's universal.

Anyhow, my point stands: modernism has detached us from the raw material of mysticism.

Oh, hey, have you read about Findhorne? The folk there came up with a wonderful co-planting system for gardening in weak soil ... so the story goes, one of the gardeners received advice directly from Pan. And he was as pictured except for head ... quite human. Hind-quarters were definitely goat-like (if memory serves). He explained the Satanic thing by pointing to how he'd always been a free-thinker.
:-)

From:

solri.livejournal.com

That was something else I read about back in the '70s. The guy might have been a bit eccentric, but he could certainly grow vegetables! Somewhat to my surprise, I just googled Findhorn and was pleased (and a little surprised) to find that the community still exists, even though Peter Caddy died in 1994.

"Raw material of mysticism" - now there's something to think about.

From:

hfx-ben.livejournal.com

... William Irwin Thompson's "Darkness and Scattered Light" is one of a very few books that have stayed with me since the 70s.

As for "raw material" ... alaya vijnana ... store-house of karmic seeds, yes? Or, more cognitively, we can only understand the moment by the lights of previous experiences. Not just at the level of active thought, but more deeply ... "cognitive schema" is a matter of wiring, Hebb assemblies and such like ... "Neurons that fire together, wire together!".

(Always nice to remind myself that I'm a clumsy and foolish old drunk who doesn't deserve even secure housing.)

From:

solri.livejournal.com

Woo, the Lindisfarne people are still around too! I remember reading a chapter by one of them (probably Thompson himself) in a book on alternative technology, sandwiched in between the windmills and the carp farms. Plus ca change ...

From:

hfx-ben.livejournal.com

IIRC it went broke a couple of times ... and I have vague memories of it having been in Colorado for a while ... not really sure.

You see, I don't actually follow phenoms like that because, well, when they transform into think-tanks they no longer represent models for "normal" people.
By way of contrast: in the late 70s models of group-living flourished. My best friend had moved to a collective in the states that financed itself doing indexing work ... yaa, literally, contracts from publishers to produce indexes. Now /that/ is a model that could apply today: a sub-set of the group doing web-work.
Our Zen Priory paid the bills by growing alfalfa sprouts ... "Bodhi Foods". Everyone pitched in on that and most of us had little enterprises of our own; top-dog had a part-time job at university installing the PLATO instructional system while working with his wife on stained-glass. I did cloisonee and drove my taxi. Another fellow made his living with pottery. And on and on.
Very livable situations.
And they're practically extinct.
Why?

You know, for pedagogical reasons I rail and rant and ask dumb questions and pronounce slightly crazed generalizations. But that's concious subterfuge. Old Zen saying, "The perfect answer becomes a donkey's hithing-post" ... providing pat answers diminishes the auditor ... Paulo Friere's pedagogy.
In truth I have a pretty good explanation of why people opt to live like an episode of "Friends": when the social contract consists of "You confirm my facade persona and I'll confirm yours", people need to live individually ... can't maintain facade persona 24/7 ... if the basic dynamic of monastic life: at some point you come to confront the "public secret" of who you really are.
And folk have come to feel an allergy to their true selves.
Actual self-loathing? Not sure ... certainly a feeling of insufficiency.
Soooo, in anticipation of failure and rejection (Withdrawal of attention and affection is the sword that dangles over moderns' heads.) they self-reject and live as isolated as they can, emerging from their lairs as required by their persona.

What I need to try is perfectly clear to me ... and I continue trying that ... but I really can't see any prospect for success. Especially since Buddhist communities have taken on the mutual-admiration society dynamic.
Is why I've increasingly withdrawn into my web-work ... the fact of my two broken feet is overcome easily enough. (Day after day, week after week, month after month I trekked downtown with my seat and two drums to make music on the street, with my feet worse than they are now.)

When those who are strongly motivated do naught, then those who've no more than aspirational values don't explore their potential.
It's all rather dire.

From:

solri.livejournal.com

I think the main reason why most communal living experiments fail is that people basically don't like living with each other in practice, however much they may like the idea in theory. (This based on my experience of hanging out in hippie communes back in the '70s, and of Turkish extended families.) The success of the nuclear family is based on having a limited number of people to hate. Even the hunter-gatherer bands of the "peaceful" !Kung manage a murder-rate equivalent to Detroit.

Me, I'd like to live on my own, but close to a community—kind of like the monk who spends long periods walled up in his cell but comes out to stroll around the monastery and take tea or chang from time to time.

By the way, I haven't seen Friends, but what you say about it strikes a chord.

From:

hfx-ben.livejournal.com

"people basically don't like living with each other in practice, however much they may like the idea in theory."
Moderns, yes. But that was my starting point.
As I wrote: "people need to live individually ... can't maintain facade persona 24/7" ... the only explanation of what I've seen.
All other things are managable ... sharing means folk end up with better food, better music, better everything and more economically. Stuff like "Other folk are too noisy/messy" is a consequence of having no real social relationships ... ill-mannered spoiled brats squabbling with other equally ill-mannered equally spoiled brats.
But, in my experience (and this applies to relationships) it's the reality that weighs heavy, inexorably: the pressure of eventually having to be authentic ... as though a hideous fate.

"The success of the nuclear family is based on having a limited number of people to hate."
huh huh ... agreed.

So: we don't deal with the fundamentals. Technology blossoms (read: spreads like a cancer) while morals and ethics take a back seat ... in an era where political amity is increasingly important. I wonder where those social insights are going to come from? (Show me a spirituality that isn't essentially practical and I'll show your rose-scented bullshit.)
We can't stand to live with others, but we're going to cope with 7B people.

"kind of like the monk who spends long periods walled up in his cell but comes out to stroll around the monastery and take tea or chang from time to time."
Congratulations ... the optimal that I've had but somewhere let slip.

What I'm advocating is just that sort of living ... for at least a period of time (3 months seems a bare minimum) ... a detox period.

Far from saying that folk aren't PITA ("pain in the ass", yaa?) I find that dealing with that is the tap-root of political insight.

"Friends" ... or "Seinfeld" ... they both leave me slack-jawed, bog-smacked ... callow, cavalier, arrogant, conceited, narcissitic ... celebrations of the culture of entitlement. For my money they're more corrosive than porn.

From:

solri.livejournal.com

I'm not sure if there's as big a difference with us moderns as you claim. It's true that we've lost some of our communal living skills, but I'm not sure the ancients were that much better at it. Like I said, most "peaceful" primitive societies are usually more violent on a day-to-day basis than we are—and I'm talking about the "nice" ones like the !Kung, not violent wackos like the Yanomami.

So any living arrangement has to take into account the fact that we are sufficiently fucked up that (a) we can't bear to live with other people for very long and (b) we can't bear to be alone for very long. (If I remember correctly, Pascal said something to the effect that all our problems come from the fact that we cannot sit quietly in our room by ourselves.)

As for Seinfeld, aren't you missing the point that it's a comedy based on people's flaws? The thing that makes it funny is that all the characters are selfish and shallow (except for Kramer, who is just nuts). Comedy is the gentle sister of tragedy: both show us the consequences of our failings.

From:

hfx-ben.livejournal.com

"Like I said, most "peaceful" primitive societies are usually more violent on a day-to-day basis than we are—and I'm talking about the "nice" ones like the !Kung,"
I've studied both, if only in 2nd year anthro course, and would say that neither have established the security that comes from agriculture.

Without calling for some mythical perfection, weren't there times of relative amity? I've read that Islamic communities lived in relative peace, c/w religious tolerance.

But I'll stand by my point: many moderns don't have the sense to check see if their PC is plugged in when it fails to boot. There's no time in their daily lives that they related to phenomenal world except for traffic and retail purchases and such as that.

As for Seinfeld, I don't think all comedy is edifying ... because it's funny and popular really doesn't indicate anything at all. I don't think you want to make that show paradigmatic of the genre. I don't find it insightful, or ironic ... just this squirmy superficiality, puerile ... it really turns me off. ("South Park", on the other hand ... or "The Daily Show" ... kettles of different sorta fish.)

Sure, the social equivalent of "grass is always greener" ... I'm not suggesting that the dawning of a Golden Age is at hand ... but from where the notion that we have to run in panic from the paradoxes? from where the notion that self-awareness is impossible and so we much knee-jerk react away compulsively from whatever causes us discomfort?
Is my point almost entirely, that.
Something I learned from having been caught in a long prairie blizzard (I mean 4 days long, not 4 hours long): misery is quite detached from death ... that I'm uncomfortably cold really and actually means almost nothing, so long as I pay appropriate attention to those "DANGER DANGER DANGER - hypothermia on the horizon"

"I am not absolutely comfortable with everyone in my surround 24/7" becomes justification for splendid isolation? Lousy logic ... sounds like self-serving sophistry to me.

Maybe moderns can't stand discomfort because they're gut-weak ... or, more likely, they've contrived a culture where they get to reward themselves for their weaknesses. "I'm so easily bored; I'll got out tonight for the 4th time this week and again spend nearly a hundred dollars on myself. Because I must ... because I'm bored at home, even with my splendid stereo, my super-hot PC, my full library, and my big-screen TV ... because I simply cannot suffer through 2 or 3 hours of boredom ... I just can't."
Junkie-talk.

"we cannot sit quietly in our room by ourselves"
Point isn't, I suggest, to sit quietly or not, but rather: if a person cannot bring themselves to do /that/, then what?
The hundreds of millions of suffering ... what would they give for the chance to sit quietly, still, warm, secure, well-fed?
But moderns have to drink more salt-water to slake their thirst ... and drink more, and again ... and again ... and again.

With that sort of psychic orientation /of course/ they will endure social indignity or injustice in the work-place ... /of course/ they will make Dem noises and then line up to support the oligarchs ... they're junkies, pure and simple.

Me? I'm a traitor and deserve to be pushed away, because I've had a life-vow not to support the myths, not to contribute to entropy, not to make the false appear true, not to encourage others into inauthenticity.

I'm not poor because I'm a perfectionist, because I demanded too much.
I'm poor because I would accept pay to join in the project of rationalizeing a situation that is unwholesome.

Another thought on re-watching Buffy

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