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“DELIVER US FROM EVIL”
In Andreas Matthias’s wonderful Daily Philosophy magazine.
There should be more hesitation, more thinking-feeling, less acting out. The idea that philosophy could be daily, like brushing your teeth, is wonderful. This also means that philosophy could be mundane, in the Socratic sense. Socrates put his body at risk, on the line, next to people, alongside them in their daily activities.
Alphonso Lingis, whom Tim knows a little bit, died recently. He was just such a philosopher, often putting himself in danger for the sake of revealing something. The school of thought called phenomenology, which I love so much, practically requires it. It’s full body contact sport.
This is Part 1 of a two-part series. We are so happy to have been asked to write it. We hope you like it. Let us know by reading it and support Andreas’s project, from which we all benefit. How he does it we don’t know.
There’s another kind of “brushing your teeth,” to wit, doing stuff on automatic without thinking at all. This is unfortunately very much what we do with the idea of God, even when we think we’re being smart—we might be exercising our intelligence in a rote way. Thinking gets stuck in a rut all the time.
And this is very much where a lot of what we call “religion” lives. Think only of the Lord’s Prayer, which…Tim doesn’t even remember when they learned it by heart, it was that long ago.
How many readers think of it as a kind of deal, a transactional kind of a thing? Don’t be shy. Tim did for sure. It was one reason for turning to Buddhism: that kind of stuff seemed so “yadda yadda, you do this and I’ll do that.” It certainly sounds like it. “I’ll do nice things, you do something nice for me.”
How wrong could someone be.
In particular, the whole “I’ll be good, and you keep me from bad stuff” part. This is what we focus in on here. But really, all of it is…so good. Just so so so good. We’re writing a book on it, it’s so good.
So if you haven’t already, do subscribe to Daily Philosophy. Oh, and read our piece!
I’m Dead
And I’m going to stay that way.
I’m writing a book for Dutch high school students. It’s called Advanced Psychic Combat Training. That’s a phrase I use in class quite a lot to describe the skills one learns in a humanities class. I say, “The real title of this class is, How to Understand, Resist and Create Propaganda.” But the secret title is, “Advanced Psychic Combat Training.”
I’m getting up every day and putting pen to paper, or rather, fingers to keyboard. It’s a very good feeling. I enjoy the writing process a lot. I’ve developed a number of tricks to make it as un-intense as possible. I pass these on to my beloved Ph.D. students.
There’s a lot of time to write. There’s a lot of head space. That’s because I’m not on social media. You may have noticed. I’ve gone. I’m dead. I’m completely gone. It took a few weeks to be completely gone. I was waiting with bated breath. A friend who follows my work closely wrote to say he had noticed that I was totally gone. That was yesterday. So I figured wow, I must be gone. Dead.
“Why not stay dead?” asks Ralph Fiennes’s character when James Bond comes back from being presumed dead, in Skyfall. It’s a question I’ve been asking.
I was thinking of coming back you see. But now I’m thinking, the advantages of being totally dead are … high.
For a start one isn’t giving extra data scraping material for free to someone.
I do get the urge. I saw a line in a newspaper article that I liked the look of just now. I imagined copying it and pasting onto a Threads post and saying something witty. I’ve forgotten the line now, five minutes later. Others may have latched on to it and approved and reposted it. Or not.
Social media was very important for me. Because of having been married to someone with NPD, I lost all my friends and family. I didn’t get get on social media as I knew it would be the end to be seen to be regarded by others, by anyone else. In any way. So when I did, I knew it would be the end. A few weeks later, it was the end.
So I have to thank social media for that—the good old “connect with lost friends” thing. I have a long list of them. I’ll be emailing you and otherwise getting back in touch in other ways.
An inner quietness is descending. I think a lot about the phrase from Philippians, “The peace of God that passes all understanding.” I think I’ll write a Live Theology! post about it. But this is a deep and wondrous peace, and it’s freely available to anyone, as you may know if you meditate a lot.
“I will not cease from mental fight” is my favorite line from the poem that gives this publication its title, the one often called “Jerusalem” although it should be called “And did those feet” or something like that. It’s appended to the end of the Preface to Blake’s brilliant Milton, an amazing sort-of reboot of that poet for a time of terror, the Napoleonic Wars.
As the urge to create little phraselets that hit like barbs comes and goes, I start to think that one way to sharpen the sword of mental fight is to leave it alone. Mindfulness is like that. Mind (or soul, I prefer that really) has its own intrinsic sharpness. Working really hard all the time to spit out darts might not be the same thing as mental fight unceasing.
The main work is to fight for one’s life outside the Mirror World.
And what is Mirror World? Well, you’ll have to read Advanced Psychic Combat Training. But I’ve been noticing something very interesting. What Marx says about ideology, that how you live your world is upside-down, as in a camera obscura, is remarkably consistently true of many, many many ideas.
Image Credit: Abelardo Morell, Camera Obscura: View of St. Louis Looking East in Building under Construction (2000)
Go To Hell
Come fly with me, let’s fly, let’s fly away.
I just found out the title of Martin Luther King’s last sermon. He didn’t deliver it because he was assassinated:
WHY AMERICA MAY GO TO HELL
😮🔥♥️
Isaac S. Villegas wonders in his essay on it, published last week, what King might have meant by that “Why.” Was it immediate, pressing reasons in the news of the moment? Or was it something of longer duration? Or even something structural?
I think that even if King intended to talk about pressing things, the longer-duration and even structural issues were WHY he himself wanted to say that America may go to Hell.
Surely the force of that “may” is “may well.” It’s entirely possible America could…turn into Hell? No, he doesn’t say that. He says “Go to Hell,” like when you die and you find out exactly who you are, and you “go” there.
But surely this must also have a flavor of “become Hell,” as in “going to Hell in a handbasket”?
And isn’t this incredible, for some, after all the “I have a dream”? But isn’t it very obvious for Black people? Villegas:
In a 1965 interview King recounted his initial hope that White ministers would lead their congregations to join the civil rights movement. “I ended up, of course, chastened and disillusioned,” he confessed. “The laxity of the white church collectively has caused me to weep tears of love.”
That King might feel obliged to say “love” rather than “rage” is a symptom of the obduracy he is describing. Tears of rage. Indeed, one way to read the title of the sermon is most definitely: “Why I am telling America it can go to Hell!”
So here I am, strolling amid the fires of Hell with my buddy William Blake. And here I am, thinking, if you’re the person who said “I have a dream,” it’s acutally nothing to do with contradicting yourself that you say “America may well go to Hell.” You’re a genius. You mean what you say.
“I have a dream” is BECAUSE of Hell. This is STRUCTURAL HELL.
They often call slavery the “original sin” of America. I think that’s too kind. Original, or structural, sin, is that sense of conscience that just is sentience, being aware of being aware (“con” from the Latin cum, meaning “with”—awareness with awareness). You carry it around like a shadow. You feel guilt about specific things because, at least if you’re a nice guy, you’re aware that you are “bad.” Or might be “bad.” You’re haunted by the fact that you may go to Hell. Being good means you realize you may go to Hell. It’s obvious really.
Only a truly evil person would think otherwise. Aka that they are the GOOD GUY, the lead character, the goodie. They have no lag, no difference, no shadow. They coincide with their image. They are one-dimensional, flat, “normotic,” “authoritarian.” They have a rigid moral code and can tell at once between good and evil, and they are the good one.
America could well be (on the way to) Hell because of its image as the good guy in general: the American dream, which in the end is a European dream. The European dream of creating an Earthly paradise. East of Eden, there’s a real one, it’s still there if you just know how to find it, says the myth. It’s like an automat there. Or Main St, USA. Fully cooked geese fly directly into your mouth: fast food indeed.
Europe tried to incarnate Paradise on Earth and therefore created Hell: a concentration camp, plantation world. This was always on the cards. America Inc. Where the president isn’t just presiding. He (definitely he) isn’t even the king. He’s your BOSS. What happens in a corporation when you do something they don’t like is, you get fired. You have to behave yourself, very strictly.
America may well go to Hell, says King, because it’s on the way already, because it’s a European dream-come-true, with number values and rows of silicon, little plantations for electrons, an algorithm for producing huge piles of wealth. A dream come true: a nightmare.
Another word for “nightmare” is Hell. In Hell, everything Means something. Something very specific, like a brand. Everything is branded. This is a bad person. This is a bad person’s finger. This is a bad person house. Words become logos. Logic becomes logistics.
No, not Greek logos, as in logic, or in the beginning was the logos…I mean logos as in the plural of LOGO.
Wait a second, why is it even called a “logo”? The Oxford English Dictionary says it’s short for (it’s a logo for!) logogram:
2.c. 1966– gen. A symbol, as found in road-signs, advertising, &c., designed to represent in simple graphic form an object, concept, or attitude.
The first usage is 1937.
1937 He wrote the first ad ever written for that new-fangled mechanical pencil called ‘Eversharp’. Designed a logo for it, too. Advertising & Selling 1 January 29
Wow.
Born Again
In more ways than one.
And DID those feet
The answer is ever so simple: no, they didn’t.
The only way to understand Blake’s poem, from where I get the title of this mag, is the simple way: we haven’t yet built “Jerusalem,” aka an enlightened, just, merciful society. Just read it.
I can do no better than show you Blake’s lovely, luminous original. Remember, the guy was writing backwards copperplate with a tiny pen on expensive (for him) metal that was reserved for his day job as an illustrator. And lavishly colored and painted. To wit, HE MEANT EVERY SINGLE WORD AND PUNCTUATION POINT. Behold: (See above image)
See? Blake really really doesn’t mean that Jesus may have been seen in some kind of Glastonbury, Grail legend fascist freakout pacing around somewhere on English soil. He really doesn’t. Like all great cartoonists, Blake is refreshingly literal and direct. That doesn’t mean he’s easy to understand: no great comic book is always going to be easy. There’s a lot of THOUGHT and FEELING curled up inside his work. Packed in. Lots of vitamins. Could give you indigestion. Savor it slowly. Think about it. He makes memes.
I WILL not cease from mental fight
I’m here to tell you about the future. Art comes from the future because you don’t (yet) know what it means…I’m here to tell you about art. I’m here to inspire you. A bow of burning gold with arrows of desire doesn’t need to shoot anyone. It’s so beautiful, erotic even, it just blows your mind. It inspires you. That’s what Blake means. That’s what I want.
Till we HAVE BUILT Jerusalem
Blog Fulllwidth
“DELIVER US FROM EVIL”
In Andreas Matthias’s wonderful Daily Philosophy magazine.
There should be more hesitation, more thinking-feeling, less acting out. The idea that philosophy could be daily, like brushing your teeth, is wonderful. This also means that philosophy could be mundane, in the Socratic sense. Socrates put his body at risk, on the line, next to people, alongside them in their daily activities.
Alphonso Lingis, whom Tim knows a little bit, died recently. He was just such a philosopher, often putting himself in danger for the sake of revealing something. The school of thought called phenomenology, which I love so much, practically requires it. It’s full body contact sport.
This is Part 1 of a two-part series. We are so happy to have been asked to write it. We hope you like it. Let us know by reading it and support Andreas’s project, from which we all benefit. How he does it we don’t know.
There’s another kind of “brushing your teeth,” to wit, doing stuff on automatic without thinking at all. This is unfortunately very much what we do with the idea of God, even when we think we’re being smart—we might be exercising our intelligence in a rote way. Thinking gets stuck in a rut all the time.
And this is very much where a lot of what we call “religion” lives. Think only of the Lord’s Prayer, which…Tim doesn’t even remember when they learned it by heart, it was that long ago.
How many readers think of it as a kind of deal, a transactional kind of a thing? Don’t be shy. Tim did for sure. It was one reason for turning to Buddhism: that kind of stuff seemed so “yadda yadda, you do this and I’ll do that.” It certainly sounds like it. “I’ll do nice things, you do something nice for me.”
How wrong could someone be.
In particular, the whole “I’ll be good, and you keep me from bad stuff” part. This is what we focus in on here. But really, all of it is…so good. Just so so so good. We’re writing a book on it, it’s so good.
So if you haven’t already, do subscribe to Daily Philosophy. Oh, and read our piece!
I’m Dead
And I’m going to stay that way.
I’m writing a book for Dutch high school students. It’s called Advanced Psychic Combat Training. That’s a phrase I use in class quite a lot to describe the skills one learns in a humanities class. I say, “The real title of this class is, How to Understand, Resist and Create Propaganda.” But the secret title is, “Advanced Psychic Combat Training.”
I’m getting up every day and putting pen to paper, or rather, fingers to keyboard. It’s a very good feeling. I enjoy the writing process a lot. I’ve developed a number of tricks to make it as un-intense as possible. I pass these on to my beloved Ph.D. students.
There’s a lot of time to write. There’s a lot of head space. That’s because I’m not on social media. You may have noticed. I’ve gone. I’m dead. I’m completely gone. It took a few weeks to be completely gone. I was waiting with bated breath. A friend who follows my work closely wrote to say he had noticed that I was totally gone. That was yesterday. So I figured wow, I must be gone. Dead.
“Why not stay dead?” asks Ralph Fiennes’s character when James Bond comes back from being presumed dead, in Skyfall. It’s a question I’ve been asking.
I was thinking of coming back you see. But now I’m thinking, the advantages of being totally dead are … high.
For a start one isn’t giving extra data scraping material for free to someone.
I do get the urge. I saw a line in a newspaper article that I liked the look of just now. I imagined copying it and pasting onto a Threads post and saying something witty. I’ve forgotten the line now, five minutes later. Others may have latched on to it and approved and reposted it. Or not.
Social media was very important for me. Because of having been married to someone with NPD, I lost all my friends and family. I didn’t get get on social media as I knew it would be the end to be seen to be regarded by others, by anyone else. In any way. So when I did, I knew it would be the end. A few weeks later, it was the end.
So I have to thank social media for that—the good old “connect with lost friends” thing. I have a long list of them. I’ll be emailing you and otherwise getting back in touch in other ways.
An inner quietness is descending. I think a lot about the phrase from Philippians, “The peace of God that passes all understanding.” I think I’ll write a Live Theology! post about it. But this is a deep and wondrous peace, and it’s freely available to anyone, as you may know if you meditate a lot.
“I will not cease from mental fight” is my favorite line from the poem that gives this publication its title, the one often called “Jerusalem” although it should be called “And did those feet” or something like that. It’s appended to the end of the Preface to Blake’s brilliant Milton, an amazing sort-of reboot of that poet for a time of terror, the Napoleonic Wars.
As the urge to create little phraselets that hit like barbs comes and goes, I start to think that one way to sharpen the sword of mental fight is to leave it alone. Mindfulness is like that. Mind (or soul, I prefer that really) has its own intrinsic sharpness. Working really hard all the time to spit out darts might not be the same thing as mental fight unceasing.
The main work is to fight for one’s life outside the Mirror World.
And what is Mirror World? Well, you’ll have to read Advanced Psychic Combat Training. But I’ve been noticing something very interesting. What Marx says about ideology, that how you live your world is upside-down, as in a camera obscura, is remarkably consistently true of many, many many ideas.
Image Credit: Abelardo Morell, Camera Obscura: View of St. Louis Looking East in Building under Construction (2000)
Go To Hell
Come fly with me, let’s fly, let’s fly away.
I just found out the title of Martin Luther King’s last sermon. He didn’t deliver it because he was assassinated:
WHY AMERICA MAY GO TO HELL
😮🔥♥️
Isaac S. Villegas wonders in his essay on it, published last week, what King might have meant by that “Why.” Was it immediate, pressing reasons in the news of the moment? Or was it something of longer duration? Or even something structural?
I think that even if King intended to talk about pressing things, the longer-duration and even structural issues were WHY he himself wanted to say that America may go to Hell.
Surely the force of that “may” is “may well.” It’s entirely possible America could…turn into Hell? No, he doesn’t say that. He says “Go to Hell,” like when you die and you find out exactly who you are, and you “go” there.
But surely this must also have a flavor of “become Hell,” as in “going to Hell in a handbasket”?
And isn’t this incredible, for some, after all the “I have a dream”? But isn’t it very obvious for Black people? Villegas:
In a 1965 interview King recounted his initial hope that White ministers would lead their congregations to join the civil rights movement. “I ended up, of course, chastened and disillusioned,” he confessed. “The laxity of the white church collectively has caused me to weep tears of love.”
That King might feel obliged to say “love” rather than “rage” is a symptom of the obduracy he is describing. Tears of rage. Indeed, one way to read the title of the sermon is most definitely: “Why I am telling America it can go to Hell!”
So here I am, strolling amid the fires of Hell with my buddy William Blake. And here I am, thinking, if you’re the person who said “I have a dream,” it’s acutally nothing to do with contradicting yourself that you say “America may well go to Hell.” You’re a genius. You mean what you say.
“I have a dream” is BECAUSE of Hell. This is STRUCTURAL HELL.
They often call slavery the “original sin” of America. I think that’s too kind. Original, or structural, sin, is that sense of conscience that just is sentience, being aware of being aware (“con” from the Latin cum, meaning “with”—awareness with awareness). You carry it around like a shadow. You feel guilt about specific things because, at least if you’re a nice guy, you’re aware that you are “bad.” Or might be “bad.” You’re haunted by the fact that you may go to Hell. Being good means you realize you may go to Hell. It’s obvious really.
Only a truly evil person would think otherwise. Aka that they are the GOOD GUY, the lead character, the goodie. They have no lag, no difference, no shadow. They coincide with their image. They are one-dimensional, flat, “normotic,” “authoritarian.” They have a rigid moral code and can tell at once between good and evil, and they are the good one.
America could well be (on the way to) Hell because of its image as the good guy in general: the American dream, which in the end is a European dream. The European dream of creating an Earthly paradise. East of Eden, there’s a real one, it’s still there if you just know how to find it, says the myth. It’s like an automat there. Or Main St, USA. Fully cooked geese fly directly into your mouth: fast food indeed.
Europe tried to incarnate Paradise on Earth and therefore created Hell: a concentration camp, plantation world. This was always on the cards. America Inc. Where the president isn’t just presiding. He (definitely he) isn’t even the king. He’s your BOSS. What happens in a corporation when you do something they don’t like is, you get fired. You have to behave yourself, very strictly.
America may well go to Hell, says King, because it’s on the way already, because it’s a European dream-come-true, with number values and rows of silicon, little plantations for electrons, an algorithm for producing huge piles of wealth. A dream come true: a nightmare.
Another word for “nightmare” is Hell. In Hell, everything Means something. Something very specific, like a brand. Everything is branded. This is a bad person. This is a bad person’s finger. This is a bad person house. Words become logos. Logic becomes logistics.
No, not Greek logos, as in logic, or in the beginning was the logos…I mean logos as in the plural of LOGO.
Wait a second, why is it even called a “logo”? The Oxford English Dictionary says it’s short for (it’s a logo for!) logogram:
2.c. 1966– gen. A symbol, as found in road-signs, advertising, &c., designed to represent in simple graphic form an object, concept, or attitude.
The first usage is 1937.
1937 He wrote the first ad ever written for that new-fangled mechanical pencil called ‘Eversharp’. Designed a logo for it, too. Advertising & Selling 1 January 29
Wow.
Born Again
In more ways than one.
And DID those feet
The answer is ever so simple: no, they didn’t.
The only way to understand Blake’s poem, from where I get the title of this mag, is the simple way: we haven’t yet built “Jerusalem,” aka an enlightened, just, merciful society. Just read it.
I can do no better than show you Blake’s lovely, luminous original. Remember, the guy was writing backwards copperplate with a tiny pen on expensive (for him) metal that was reserved for his day job as an illustrator. And lavishly colored and painted. To wit, HE MEANT EVERY SINGLE WORD AND PUNCTUATION POINT. Behold: (See above image)
See? Blake really really doesn’t mean that Jesus may have been seen in some kind of Glastonbury, Grail legend fascist freakout pacing around somewhere on English soil. He really doesn’t. Like all great cartoonists, Blake is refreshingly literal and direct. That doesn’t mean he’s easy to understand: no great comic book is always going to be easy. There’s a lot of THOUGHT and FEELING curled up inside his work. Packed in. Lots of vitamins. Could give you indigestion. Savor it slowly. Think about it. He makes memes.
I WILL not cease from mental fight
I’m here to tell you about the future. Art comes from the future because you don’t (yet) know what it means…I’m here to tell you about art. I’m here to inspire you. A bow of burning gold with arrows of desire doesn’t need to shoot anyone. It’s so beautiful, erotic even, it just blows your mind. It inspires you. That’s what Blake means. That’s what I want.
Till we HAVE BUILT Jerusalem