I woke up when you said,

“it’s late, and I’m feeling heavy,

could you hold my aching head?”

-Daniel Lanois (Acadie)

We gots a little rain in the American Bread-basket that is Gullyvornya.  Peace be to Jimmeny Christmas & the Gulf Stream, et al.  The farmers yanked back their tarps from their hoop greenhouses as a gesture of welcome, because watering your crops and orchards in December is considered a bad sign around here.  It’s still a bad year, but count the blessings that come.

My buddy G sez my “later” blogging (if and when it ever actually happens) sounds like the late saxophone squigglings of the Weather Underground brass section (he is one of the funniest and more profound capitalists you will ever meet, and that means something).    

G also sez Orlov’s Five Stages of Collapse was clarifying.  

Returning to his & mine ancient drinking hijinx, Big G wrote:

Speaking of baking cakes, your Bro Mike has never forgiven me for the Twain Hart Scandal of 1980!

By the thinnest of hairs we escaped the Big Bust. But you and J. were Incorrigible, with escapades in the bushes of TH despite all my entreaties and protests!

At an uncertain time later I ralphed in the tributary of Cow Creek and collapsed into a deep slumber (or coma)! And youz guyz hijacked the Chevelle and went down the hill for more booze (or female accompaniment)!

You were 19, and I was 21. How do we get back there?!?

You gotta be a brother to your brothers and sis’s.  That is built-in programming.

Now, enjoy some Daniel Lanois:

Jon Turley displayed the temerity to call Obama’s NSA speechifying a “nothing-burger.”  Nothing-burger from nothing-burger means nothing-burger, you gotta have something-burger, if you want to be with Jon!  I don’t think Jon understands Obama’s deep humility concerning the code of silence amongst hardened criminals.  Nothing-burger indeed!  Do you know how hard it is to be a nothing-burger when selling yourself as change you can believe in?

Omerta is doing his business, while I am doing mine.

It is not necessary to teach others, to cure them or to improve them; it is only necessary to live among them, sharing the human condition, and being present to them in love. Charles de Foucauld

I’m still learning.  

Via Ilargi:

Here’s Jung from his book ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’, published in 1963, 2 years after his death, in the paragraphs with which he closes the chapter “The Tower”:

 Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The “newness” in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new , in things that have just come into being. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things. We are very far from having finished completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend.

   Nevertheless, we have plunged down a cataract of progress, which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots. Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motion. But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the “discontents” of civilisation and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up.

   We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognise that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of greater freedom is cancelled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us.

   The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.

   Reforms by advances, that is, by new methods or gadgets, are of course impressive at first, but in the long run they are dubious and in any case dearly paid for. They by no means increase the contentment or happiness of people on the whole. Mostly, they are deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications, which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before. Omnis festinatio ex parte diaboli est – all haste is of the devil, as the old masters used to say.

   Reforms by retrogressions, on the other hand, are as a rule less expensive and in addition more lasting, for they return to the simpler, tried and tested ways of the past and make the sparsest use of newspapers, radio, television, and all supposedly timesaving innovations.

   In this book I have devoted considerable space to my subjective view of the world, which, however, is not a product of rational thinking. It is rather a vision such as will come to one who undertakes, deliberately, with half-closed eyes and somewhat closed ears, to see and hear the form and voice of being. If our impressions are too distinct, we are held to the hour and minute of the present and have no way of knowing how our ancestral psyches listen to and understand the present – in other words, how our unconscious is responding to it. Thus we remain ignorant of whether our ancestral components find elementary gratification in our lives, or whether they are repelled. Inner peace and contentment depend in large measure upon whether or not the historical family, which is inherent in the individual, can be harmonised with the ephemeral conditions of the present.

   In the Tower at Bollingen it is as if one lived in many centuries simultaneously. The place will outlive me, and in its location and style it points backwards to things of long ago. There is very little about it to suggest the present. If a man of the sixteenth century were to move into the house, only the kerosene lamp and the matches would be new to him; otherwise, he would know his way about without difficulty. There is nothing to disturb the dead, neither electric light nor telephone. Moreover, my ancestors’ souls are sustained by the atmosphere of the house, since I answer for them the questions that their lives once left behind. I carve out rough answers as best I can. I have even drawn them on the walls. It is as if a silent, greater family, stretching down the centuries, were peopling the house. There I live in my second personality and see life in the round, as something forever coming into being and passing on.

I heated a saucepan, threw in oil and onions.  Then bacon.  What next?  Two pears, some black olives, the best kind, organic and salty.  Last, feta.  Oh, boy.  This is the beginning of a beautiful food relationship.

I am impressed sometimes with our current crop of youngsters.  Wild, beautiful, and damned, tho’ they may be, they seem to know it.  I met a western Mass.  “hippie chick” at GG Park this morning.  I guess the correct descriptive is “vivacious.”  Intensely intelligent and charming.  Casting herself to the wind.  Wanted to sell her paintings on Haight until her gig came thru in October.  Didn’t know who Arlo Guthrie wuz,  but you wouldn’t blame her if you met her dazzling thrill to be alive.  I was merely looking for my old squirrel buddies when I met her.  Her smile was contagious, and she almost followed me in my quest for books on North Beach, which the old geezer found touching.

At Original Joe’s yet another cucumber was ripening (oh, my) under the leaves, this time a beautiful secessionist from Burlington, VT.  Totally engaging.  Enthralling, when you get right down to it.  She knew Arlo, actually met the chip off the old block.

The good news is that a lot of the young people get it.

Today was a good day for geezers.  

Seamus died on Friday.  I honestly enjoyed his translation of Beowulf, wherein he welded the monkey wrenches of English together.  I don’t have time to find his grave words from the introduction of that text, wherein he describes the vague menace at the border “from Grendel,” but it’s a beautiful figure of speech relevant to our time. I don’t give a fig whether or not he was greater than Yeats.  How would I know?   But this was truly a great one, from 2002, both didactic and beautiful:

Sophoclean  

First he was shivering on the shore in skins

Or hunkering behind shell-middens in a cave.

Then he took up oars, put tackle on a mast,

And steered himself by the stars through gales.

Once upon a time from the womb of earth

The gods were born and he bowed down

To worship them. Then he walked tall

From temple to agora, talking against himself.

The wind is no more swift or mysterious

Than his mind and words; he has mastered thinking,

Roofed his house against hail and rain,

And worked out laws for living together.

Homemaker, thought-taker, measure of all things,

He survives every danger except death

And will yield to nothing else. Nothing

Else, good or evil, is beyond him.

When truth is the treadle of his loom

And justice the shuttle, all due honor

Will come his way. But let him once

Overbear or overstep

What the city allows, treat law

As something he can decide for himself –

Then let this marvel of the world remember:

When he comes begging we will turn our backs.

–Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney is dead, amidst the countless dying generations of fish, flesh, and fowl, and the mercury sank again in the mouth of a dying day.

best wishes.

Bernhard at MoonofAlabama remains a continual flow of common sense with respect to US foreign policy, strangely similar to Herr Daniel Larison, in some ways.  I really don’t care about their conservative or liberal affiliations and credentials.  They both sound right to me on most occasions.

Apparent jackass, Laura Rozen had this to say of MoA’s analysis of Syria:    

Laura Rozen ?@lrozen

look moon you wld like nothing better than russia & iran & china architects of global order. “@MoonofA:

To which billmon sed:

billmon ?@billmon1

@MoonofA @lrozen Scratch a “liberal” interventionist, find Joe McCarthy hiding underneath.

Sure enough.  I’m still looking at you, driftglass, even tho’ you disavowed intervention in Syria, I am still looking at you.  And booman, yeppers.  I’m looking at you both with one eye.  

You are the people for whom the term, “cruise missile liberals,” was invented.  You and John Kerry…and the Muslim Kenyan Usurper Hawaiian Devil Baby, Barack Obama.

Instead I’d suggest trying Living in Truth:

Vaclav Havel: Living in Truth:

(The power of living in truth) does not reside in the strength of definable political or social groups, but chiefly in a potential, which is hidden throughout the whole of society, including the official power structures of that society. Therefore this power does not rely on soldiers of its own, but on soldiers of the enemy as it were-that is to say, on everyone who is living within the lie and who may be struck at any moment (in theory, at least) by the force of truth (or who, out of an instinctive desire to protect their position, may at least adapt to that force). It is a bacteriological weapon, so to speak, utilized when conditions are ripe by a single civilian to disarm an entire division…. This, too, is why the regime prosecutes, almost as a reflex action, preventatively, even modest attempts to live in truth (p.23).

forgive me for not providing links.  I’m very, prohibitively tired and time-constrained, wishing you all the best.

via Lord Black:

One U.S. official who has been briefed on the options on Syria said he believed the White House would seek a level of intensity “just muscular enough not to get mocked” but not so devastating that it would prompt a response from Syrian allies Iran and Russia.

“They are looking at what is just enough to mean something, just enough to be more than symbolic,” he said.

Apparently, the former Constitutional Law Prof His Most Cynical Majesty is still floating trial balloons on Syria, yet Chief Prostitute Jay Carney has no qualms.  I personally would not use Ari Fleischer or Jay Carney to feed my plants, based on their inherent toxicity, BYMMV.

“Mockery Avoidance.”  It’s too beautiful to fuck with.

Here.

On one side: Same small group of elite morons who led us into Iraq. On the other side: Everybody else. Obama: “Boy, that’s a tough one.”

I honestly think there’s a fair chance that Obama will be the last custodian of this sewage plant.

was inevitable.  We were always going to war against Syria.  Who did not see this?  There is nothing just about it.  We don’t deal in justice.  We deal in resources first, and fake resources (money, it’s a drag) second.  Any questions?

Ian Welsh reports that Stirling Newberry had a serious stroke.  His cultivated and polymathic mind is utterly unique and irreplaceable, and will be sorely missed during a long and difficult rehabilitation.  We wish him the best.

So, to my mind, here’s where we get down to the nitty gritty of animal intelligence.  Reflexes.  Built-in, hard-core reflexes.  You might think of them as the prototypical, monosynaptic “knee-jerk”, in which the doctor lightly hammers the tendon below your kneecap, which stretches specific muscular stretch receptors, which send a signal to the spine and back to “stiffen up,” mainly for automatic postural purposes outside of your cognitive grasp.  Hence the leg kick, outside of your normal cognitive grasp. The knee-jerk reflex is simply a way for you to keep upright without your having to think about it, an unexpected load occurs on one side, boom, you’re good.

Now, there are reflexes, and there are reflexes, depending on your definition, the knee-jerk being a fairly low-level event.  Then there are locomotor reflexes, involving multiple oscillators, for example, that aid walking, as opposed to just standing upright, even though both levels are integrated.  Within this level are neuronal circuits controlling ambles, trots, gallops, etc., whether in horse or turtle or man.  So-called “fictive locomotion” studies, wherein neuronal recordings from dismembered turtles on ice are made, demonstrate this.  

Then the coordination of reflexes occurs at the level of “fixed action pattern,” or what others preferred to call “modal action patterns,” because while reliable, the exact order of behavior is not engraved in stone.  Classic examples from Tinbergen and Lorenz include seagull egg-rolling-toward-the-nest and following behavior when, e.g., neonatal ducklings imprint upon any available moving object, even if that object is no more endearing than a dangling and moving tennis shoe, as if it were a parental device.

Next up in the hierarchy of reflexes from Tinbergen et al is Timberlake’s Behavior System, which is really a mash-up of Tinbergen and Pavlov, even tho’ Joe Steinmetz, one of the great bunny eye-blink researchers of all time, and a great chairperson, said with some admiration in his eyes that Timberlake was a “maverick.”  Ho, ho, ho, Joe.  I love you, but he’s only a maverick to you strict Pavlovians.  Not to me.  

In Timberlake’s system of reflexes, animals gravitate toward their central topics of needs:  Feeding, Flying, Fucking, Orientation/Migration, etc., and evocation of a system, Feeding, Parenting, Defense, e.g.,  results in some semi-orderly evocation of motivational states that orchestrate subsequent behavior sub-routines of reflexes, such as, food handling and ingestion, focal search for food, and more global searches.  

I studied the next level of reflex, what I now provisionally call the global action pattern, one reflex that functions over not instances, or minutes, or hours, but days.  And nothing will do but an example to describe it.

But this following description, I believe, goes a long way toward describing Monsieur Greer’s point.