I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so
What I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me — that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter — except to show how very dull we are ...
November 17, 2011 - 10:43 a.m.
I had another bad night of cramping last night. So I got up at 4 or 5 AM and took a hot bath. That helped and the cramping stop but of course I didn't get much sleep. On the other hand as Archimedes demonstrated a bath is a good place to think. I was actually hoping to sleep but that didn't happen. When I got out I jotted down the key points I remembered in my free association and now I'll try and recreate it.
The starting point was something really nice that Ethan posted on my Facebook Wall.
Gordon Nash is one of the most unique and marvelous folk personalities we know. I was thrilled we were positively mentioned in his review of NERFA's formalI feel a bit churlish saying this but Ethan knows I love him. While feeling validation and pride I was also jarred by something. He struck a linguistic nerve; unique means one of a kind, you can't be "most unique." The root is "uni" meaning "one." People have started to use unique to mean unusual but if that is what you mean just say "unusual." I think this is a practice that started in my lifetime which is why it bothers me so much. There is now no common word that means "one of a kind." The language has been degraded.
But that's not my point. That's just the setup. I've actually written about that before. The question is can we put the genie back in the bottle? Is it too late to reclaim the unique meaning of unique? Maybe it isn't but I try. If enough people speak out perhaps it will start sounding wrong to enough people. It's a pretty hopeless fight, quixotic even. But that's what Wise Madness is about. The title is a reference to Don Quixote's preference of wise madness over foolish sanity. So the fact that it is a lost cause is no reason to stop fighting for it. As Thomas Jefferson Smith said, "lost causes are the ones you fight the hardest for." What is victory anyway? I'll take the victory that Arthur had in the Battle of Camlann fields, at least in the T.H. White/Lerner and Loewe version.
The important thing is not that there is a Camelot or even that there was a Camelot, but that people want there to be a Camelot. We want to be better than ourselves.
That put me in mind of a quote by James Branch Cabell that I had forgotten was put in the mouth of Horvendile.
" ... At its uttermost, this success is but the strivings of an ape reft of his tail and grown rusty at climbing, who yet feels himself to be a symbol and the frail representative of Omnipotence in a place that is not home."Civilization and culture are the result of an ape with dreams of upward mobility. So we aspire to follow Jefferson's prescription for life, to be just and good. We aspire to be wise. We aspire to be a demiurge, creating worlds with just a word, or music, or paint, or mathematics.
So here I am sitting in a tub getting near 5 AM and feeling inspired. As I'm reading Small Gods I realize that I feel like a prophet. Or at least I imagine that at least some prophets experienced that moment of clarity and inspiration and then ruined it by attributing it to god or gods. Why is it ruining it? Because when I say that these ideas came from my own head no one will hesitate to call me an idiot if that's how they feel. People are not as quick to call god an idiot. And so people end up believing in idiocies because they can't emotionally face the alternative.
I lost the next step in my line of thought but that led to thinking how religion for the most part is a conservative force supporting the status quo. Yes there are exceptions. There are times when religion is a force for change though even then it is usually someone co-opting it and using it as a vehicle to convince people, not from the established religious powers. There's a good reason for that. A religion that says that the world isn't as it should be isn't going to be in it for the long run. People will question why the god or gods let the world stay in this shape. When it advocates change it has to either succeed fairly quickly or give up the fight.
That's when I got out of the bath and after drying myself rushed to my computer to write things down. Here are the notes I constructed this from.
Ethan more unique to fighting the language fight to being quixotic thus wise madness to aspiring to be better to being an ape with upward mobility to being just and good and wise and being a creator to creating with a word or music or paint or math to feeling like a prophet to the claim of being a prophet is evil to it being easier to call me an idiot than to call god an idiot to religion not being stable when it doesn't support the status quo.
I know I owe you more on NERFA. I'll eat breakfast, do some grading, and then come back and write more if I have time before I leave to see Red Molly. That is of course more motivation to write now as I'll have to write about that tomorrow.
I signed the Pro-Truth Pledge:
please hold me accountable.
Memories: Not that Horrid Song - May 29, 2018
Wise Madness is Now In Session - May 28, 2018
The NFL and the First Amendment - May 27, 2018
On The Road Again - May 26, 2018
Oliver the Three-Eyed Crow - May 25, 2018
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Horvendile November 17, 2011
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