Absolutely. Clearly part of the long-predicted pattern. The obsessed are blinded by the object of their obsession, be it an objective object or a subjective object. Compulsive collective behaviors driven by unconscious factors always push far beyond any prevailing envelope. As I have said for 35 years, this behavior will not be curtailed; insight will not develop in significant circles: magnitude of the required subjective change is too great. Disjunction between assumptions underlying the institutional base and those of the evolving worldview construct has become far too extreme to permit that. The massive U.S.-based financial involvement in the Ukrainian elections and street protests is the functional equivalent to the massive U.S. recruitment of Chinese agents of influence on U.S. campuses which eventually pushed China well beyond its prevailing envelope for change. One factor in formation of a Greater China; one factor in formation of a Germano-Russian Bloc. Apotheosis will involve collective unconscious orchestration of allegiances relative to the fundamental assumptions virtually no one is aware of. The Japanese, for instance, cannot discuss relevant issues amongst themselves; they can only utter explicatives when nearly dead-drunk and subject to probing provocation. The affect-charge wherewithal the explicatives abound, however, will govern collective behaviors in national crisis. Thus will allegiances fall into their folds. Formation of a Greater China, say. It is not a matter of interest whether or not such crazy ideas as these are or are not given credence. I am telling you it is not possible they could be given credence: that is the nature of the conscious case.
Regarding the other issue you raise, I will only venture to repeat the observation earlier made: there is nothing I've seen in press accounts of the current remake of the U.S. national security apparatus that was not seen in the CORDS remake of the U.S. bureaucracy in Saigon -- including the fact that in the CORDS case impetus for "reform" derived from consequences of a strength estimate falsified on the highest authority.
Look, ever since 1907 (published in 1916; strong evidentiary support beginning in 1919) we have known there never has been and never will be anywhere in any universe a “summation of forces”. That being the case, there has never been any possibility of “majority rule” -- and history has born out this fact, even if hagiography has not. Be the activism, the street theater, the mass murder on behalf of a “summation of forces” left-wing or right-wing in inspiration, consonant with the vision of a moral majority or not, that which is viewed remains unaltered, regardless of the quality of wool through which the scene is imaged. All political-economy analogues of Cartesian-Newtonian precepts have long been dead, even as the acolytes prepare another mass slaughter on their behalf. The tipping point in higher mathematics came before Marx left Germany. I see no call to action. The vast bulk of human problems plaguing the planet will be rapidly removed following cusp as a result of what is being done daily in the lab to superconductant DNA on basis of dead Cartesian-Newtonian precepts. There is no possibility the greatest coding system of all time is based on a single-level cipher existing independent of SUPERPOSED relativistic-quantum phase digits. Unless you command the rules of time reversion, no action taken now will remove consequences of what has already been done. Nonetheless, just as the Incas once promulgated a war against time via human sacrifice, so will the globalized “We are the world!” generation. “Kill the 19th century dead!” was the rallying cry WWI ended; remainder of the 20th century was spent trying to reverse what had happened in its first decade. Impetus behind the 21st century decade of global Generation Kill will be set against time itself. The cartoon mongers daily prefigure it!
Though for over thirty years I have been castigated as a doomsayer and pretended Cassandra with apocalyptic pronouncements, it now appears that my sense of the thing has been rather conservative. I have said “minimally an increase of an order of magnitude in the megakill over that of WWII”. Hundreds of millions instead of tens of millions. Not really such an astounding notion, given increase in population of the planet over the past sixty years -- an increase by most-optimistic estimate projected to continue into mid-century, even as rates of population growth are projected to fall off over that period (barring the unforeseen, of course). These days the medical authorities are forecasting the possibility of 100-million dead due to a single incident of bird-flu pandemic. This predicted possibility in what some doctors regard a virtually inevitable pandemic appears to be based on nothing more sophisticated than the fact that it is estimated that approximately 100-million died worldwide in the 1918 Spanish-flu pandemic. The increase in planetary population since 1918 seems not to have been taken into account. This suggests that the sophistication at non-parametric statistical inference developed by Jacob Wolfowitz and his peers in the years during and immediately following WWII has yet to be assimilated by the field of epidemiology. And this, of course, does not take into account non-statistical “cascade-effects” -- cascade theory presenting a computer-modeling alternative, or adjunctive approach, to non-parametric statistical inference. Furthermore, there are many anomalies in the public reporting on the forecast made by the leading authorities. Newsweek, for instance, in its recent account (December 13, 2004, “Bird-Flu Challenge”, p. 47) tells us in back-to-back sentences that the mortality rate from infection with the H5N1 virus has been 73 percent, while the WHO predicts that a pandemic could infect billions of people and result in 100-million deaths as a worst case. For me, these numbers and this percentage do not compute. Perhaps what little knowledge of theoretical statistics I possess is simply too little. The faith in reverse-engineering genetics of vaccines factored into the implied epidemiologic statistical equation seems to me to defy the “laws” of probability.
But this is the least of it. Bryan Walsh, in a Time essay (December 13, 2004, “The Threat That Knows No Boundaries”, p. 64) lays the blame for the arising of new viruses on “…Asia's age-old backyard farming practices -- whereby animals and human beings live in close proximity, giving rise to new viruses like H5N1…” This assertion also, for me, does not compute. Perhaps what little knowledge I have of the theory of causality in philosophy of science is simply too little. I have perhaps mistakenly assumed that proximality of probable cause is temporal no less than spatial. The more proximal the probable cause, both temporally and spatially, the more probably the cause is an efficient cause. But here in Walsh's assertion we have spatial proximity but temporal inefficiency, indeed, an inefficiency of an order “age-old” -- at the very least several several thousand years. This is similar to the temporal inefficiency in probable cause of the arising of HIV through human-monkey contact -- given that humans have lived deep in the forest for tens of tens of thousands of years. (I have yet to see a statistical analysis of the epidemiologic consequences of road building in central Africa sufficiently convincing to justify putting all the AIDS research eggs into this basket of theory as to the arising of the HIV virus. I have also yet to see a convincing explanation as to why, if the mosquito needle carries an enzyme that kills or pathofunctionally inactivates HIV, thereby preventing mosquito-borne AIDS, so few of the AIDS research eggs are put into investigation of the implications of this “fact”.) Moreover, this implied disjunction of temporal and spatial proximality of probable cause of the arising of bird-flu virus is belied by personal behaviors of the medical authorities promulgating it. While working in medical offices in Beverly Hills, I noticed a high statistical correlation between income of helping professionals and their predilection to shop at the Whole Foods market down the street, a market offering free-range chickens at premium prices. Only those at the bottom end of the LA feeding frenzy “choose” to eat from the trough of the pharma-ized domesticated animal manufacturing industry.
Reaching back almost forty years now, I remember one little-discussed reason why, while near the top of the class, I chose to quit Special Forces medic training in the last week of “dog lab” (the final week of a year-and-a-half of intensive training). This one of numerous reasons, but not the primary reason, was the disjunction between what I had learned in lab training (live blood, slide prep, stool analysis, urinanalysis, CBC, WBC, dark-field analysis, parasitology, identifying and distinguishing between gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria so as to choose the proper antibiotic for those bacterial diseases amongst the hundred tropical diseases we had been taught to diagnose and treat, and so on) and what was to be expected of me during MEDCAPs. I decided I simply didn't need the personal bad karma likely to be thus accumulated. Medical Civic Action Patrols dispensed huge quantities of broad-spectrum antibiotics as propaganda-by-injection-and-colored-pill. In fact, this was done so indiscriminately, one could only dress it up by using the designation “prophylactic” (and often done in lieu of prophylactics). Most elaborately in Vietnam, Laos, and northeast Thailand. Many past-expiration-date and first-world-outlawed drugs were later “dumped” in Southeast Asia via “informal markets”. Later yet, there was a huge increase in the nearly-indiscriminate use of antibiotics in animal husbandry and aquaculture throughout the region (as with most other regions). While I realize that separating animals and humans in backyard farming practices is a reasonable behavior in fighting a bird-flu epidemic once the H5N1 virus has arisen, I do not assert that the above-noted antibiotic human behavior over a mere forty years was any more than a highly inefficient temporal and spatial proximal cause of the “arising” of H5N1. The word “arising” implies not only the virus' genetic origination-modification, but also its efficient penetration of anti-viral immunity, fowl and human. The above-noted antibiotic human behavior not only alters defense mechanisms of bacteria, but alters, for instance, probiotic content of bowels, be the bowels those of humans, farm animals, farmed fish, shellfish, shrimp, or whatever. Such chronic alteration affects immune system function, indeed, level of immune competency -- including anti-viral immune competency. This does not necessarily mean I am an advocate of high colonics for wild birds, chickens, and ducks. Given the effects of pharma and biotech in an animal husbandry rapidly transiting to animal manufacturing, separating animal and human in the backyard may be a useful epidemic management strategy, while simultaneously contributing to first causes of the epidemic being managed (not to mention first causes of future manageable epidemics and unmanageable pandemics). Indeed, separating animals from the human feeding frenzy may be the last cascade effect in applied management of first causes, even if this method has limited utility once human-to-human transmission has gotten substantially underway relative to a given pathogen. The same principle is involved here as in conflation of the rising incidence of TB with resistance to antibiotics by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, as public discourse about this disease often does in service to the needs of pharma. Record levels of pollution, dietary inadequacy, and other such factors are not sufficiently efficiently involved with causes of increasing incidence of TB to be a focus of epidemiologic management (of the rising incidence). Ha! The blue-shirted pharmas will always arrive at the last minute with their Gatling-gunned gold-plated silver bullets, obviating the need to redress efficient causes of increasing incidence: built-in obsolescence in its modern medical form. Real solutions to contemporary problems, in no matter what area, are not good business. Which tells us a lot about how unfettered markets will self-organize solutions to problems existing in the domains of externalities.
But this, again, is likely the least of it. Why this medical attachment to inefficient temporal causality -- as opposed to efficient causality of increasing incidence? Economies of pharma, biotech, industrialized agriculture, and telecommunications (altered post-WWII global ambient radiation “probable” effects on RNA- and DNA-viruses) assumed, motivations for forced-draft urbanization assumed, still there is larger contextualization to consider. The systematic suppression of quantum perspectives in chemistry, biology, and medicine, whether or not my account of the origins of this suppression is supportable -- to the point where two-time Nobel laureates cannot get quantum approaches to basic research funded, say, an Albert Szent-Györgyi; not to mention denial of Nobel prizes for somehow successfully carrying out breakaway research in denied areas, say, a Gilbert Ling -- is mere symptom of a science-wide dissimulation ill-informing the human species as to the actual character and properties of the situation that species currently faces. I, for one, know I don't know what that situation actually is. And, of course, we have nothing to fear from creation of broad-spectrum phages in the lab to attack outside the lab bacteria resistant to antibiotics, as the DNA and RNA in the involved newly-created viruses, as all well-informed researchers know, have no biologically-active quantum properties. There is no such thing as the submolecular biology to which Albert Szent-Györgyi wrote an introduction in 1968. We know this because such a submolecular biology certainly hasn't been developed much since then! It has long been my extrapolation from this explicit dysinformed state that when the pandemics come, as they very likely will, they will come from completely unexpected “directions” (plausible denial of culpability at that time -- having been well prefigured -- relying heavily upon a postmodern rhetoric of inefficient temporal causality).
Come on! How is it you imagine psychologically-failed persons could create or maintain “together” organizations -- whatever the purpose of those organizations? Read the newspapers! What is Board management style at Disney, for instance? Black board jungle is the American management paradigm for no good reason? Newtonian countervailing forces and encounter group decision making are not exactly logically incompatible, you know. Blood over the conference table due to the latest sneak attack. When the appointed superego makes his appearance he has to be a pool hustler and knock some heads to make his presence known to the infantile ids he must baby-sit by setting up cross-currents amongst the charges he has been placed in charge of. How else could the necessary vectoring be accomplished? In this management paradigm, management superegos are management superegos, a class unto themselves. Management is management; specificities of that which is to be managed are mere matters of accommodation (logical accommodation on basis of general principles). An adept at cross-currents can discharge his responsibilities whatever the character of the charges he is placed in charge of. Business, government, military, intelligence: where's the potential difference? Cross-currents are cross-currents. The voltage of conflict resolution is in the transformer, which is a device of universal application fulfilling a set of universal design criteria: the magic hand wiping the blood from the table. Mixed metaphors are the nature of the case! Institutionalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm is nothing if not a basket of mixed metaphors. Room temperature superconductivity? Well, that's another paradigm.
Clearly, there was no intelligence production failure relative to bin Laden or Iraq, just as there was no intelligence production failure relative to Vietnam. These accomplishments occurred in spite of institutional constraints because informal “communities of practice” formed within the institutions, and were later formalized -- e.g., Political Order of Battle, the Bin Laden Issue Station -- communities which ignored constraints placed across paths to fulfillment of mission statements. The mission is not the mission: this koan, informal communities of practice arise to penetrate and transcend. Informal communities of practice can't be allowed to exist, as far as prevailing institutional design criteria are concerned; therefore, if they emerge, they must be formalized. And the principles of practice within such non-existent informal communities certainly couldn't become integrated into the formal design criteria. That would violate the paradigm! In both cases, Vietnam and the current case, however, there was an intelligence assimilation and utilization failure; a short-circuit developed because agendas of management superegos were not supported by the facts. Agendas were pre-set to specified voltages which could not be reset under the influence of fact. The hardwired transformers employed were phase-governed, constructed to function only between specified voltages. The short-circuit was used to set up cross-currents which fed back into the intelligence production process, modifying its factual output by the placement of a fuse in the information bus. This fuse failed because its rated amperage was inadequate to magnitude of the disjunction between agenda and fact. The superegos placing the fuse chose the wrong amperage because they were overcommitted to the specified voltages of the circuit through the transformers employed. In aftermath of the blown fuse, it was decided that the whole system had to be redesigned. The premise upon which the new design criteria were formulated, in both cases, was that there had been an initial intelligence production failure relative to enemy strength and capabilities. The new system in Vietnam, and the new system to come, was and will be an outgrowth logically accommodating the false premise upon which it was and is predicated. Moreover, that new system was and will be an even more perfect embodiment of the fundamental principles informing the management paradigm governing integration of circuits within the formal target community. Why? Because imposing this failed paradigm on the WholeEarth is the agenda not supported by the facts to which the superegos are overcommitted.
Stephen Glain's Newsweek article (“Yet Another Great Game”, December 20, 2004) gives the reader, I think, an opportunity to envision how rapidly events are likely to unfold from their present state of elaboration. And how much “acts of desperation” will be involved. Glain's comments are based on access to a U.S. defense document that discusses China's “petrodiplomacy” in Africa as well as its “forward deployment” moves to secure sea lanes -- the “petroleum transport route” -- between the Persian Gulf and East Asia. Isn't such forward deployment already an “act of desperation”? Lots of luck, China, securing those lanes when the shooting starts: these days, this is predominately a space warfare problem, not an antisubmarine warfare problem. Stealth oil tankers are likely a pipe dream. China has long since figured that out, of course -- in spite of periodically giving in to paroxysms of desperation -- and this is the subtext behind its past, present, and future relations to Iran, North Korea, Pakistan… and part of the rhyme and reason for its colonization of the trans-Amur frontier. Seizing a strategic oil pipeline is a gratuitous act unless you take control of the valve at its point of origin. China also knows that the oil bind is a major factor auguring for the bonding of Japan's fate to her own: even in these days of internet telepresence (but not oil teleportation), geographical factors retain significant strategic potency. Lots of luck, America, keeping Japan within the U.S. orbit once the shooting starts. Glain's article notes that both China and the U.S. regard energy security issues as constituting a zero-sum game. Surprise, surprise! How could it be otherwise relative to a dwindling finite resource, absence of which will require a retooling the likes of which the planet, not only has never seen, but has never even, yet, begun to actually imagine. The end of oil is not the end of oil; it is the end of the carboniferous fuel cycle in history of human energy engagements with nature: wood, coal, petroleum. Under wood, planetary human population never exceeded hundreds of millions; in several hundred years of coal and petroleum that population has jumped to in excess of 6 billion. No going back to wood without witling away about 5 billion. The non-negotiable issues also are tracking on becoming wholly unresponsive to hypothetical modulation behaviors. Oil is rapidly leaving the realm of economic resource and becoming a strategic or tactical military resource -- strategic or tactical depending on what you think the governing parameters of the China-U.S. “theater” (old word: phase, is more accurate) of the “superposed” global war will be. The EU, of course, needs oil, too. Mustn't forget that phase of global war -- and what it eventually will do to German-Russian relations. I been thinkin' 'bout dis ever since Strategic Research and Analysis. Multiple “classes” of global war -- phases, really, I repeat -- are evolving simultaneously in the same space of contention, some classes presently more elaborated than others: Islamist-terrorist war to resurrect the Caliphate; petrowar between nation-states; war of the informally organized extra-legal, forced-migration, squatter sector against the very notion of a formalized nation-state system; eco-terrorist war against the malfeasant multinationals; nation-state system warfare against the “impracticality” of civil liberties; pretenders to new paradigm thought warring upon the clingers; all against all (tribe holocausting tribal other; religion vilifying religion); and so on.
In my opinion, collective behaviors are not the resultant of a summation (deterministic, statistical, chaotic) of individual actions; individual actions are the decomposition product of collective behaviors. This principle applies no less to human processes than to the collective and cooperative behaviors studied by quantum physicists. My opinion here stands behind why I would suggest that the deterrence value of any surreptitious threats to nuke Mecca or the Aswan Dam could only be limited, whatever their effects on bin Laden or the prevailing Egyptian government: event gradients are (unconsciously) collectively determined, and individual (conscious) decisions don't occur off those gradients (particularly so of individuals psychologically identified with collectively conferred role attributions). Not to mention recent commentator comments concerning possible nuking of Gulf ports in all-out petrowar: a real upgrade from mere port embargos. Invariant properties of the “collective psychosis of the nation” (p. 49), the “trance [that] can last for generations” (p. 64), the “collective autism” (p. 67) call forth the requisite individual decisions. These quoted phrases are from Chris Hedges' book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning (Anchor, 2003). Although Hedges' use of these phrases is certainly accurate, and graphically contextualized, I see no reason to accept his subordinate thesis that historical accountability, collective repentance, national catharsis, restoration of public memory through identification of the individual dead so they can be psychologically resurrected would prevent war and genocide -- though it must be admitted, as he states (p. 17), that he did not write his book “to dissuade us from war” -- as, again in my opinion, it is how the invariant properties of the state were created in mirror image to the invariant properties of collective psychosis, be that psychosis a psychosis of war or a psychosis of peace, that is the actual variable needing to be addressed. State as the form of governance; governance as the form of organization: these are two invariances needing scrutiny. The political-theory, jurisprudence, practical-governance, thick-or-thin-blue-line spill-off of my above-stated very Platonic opinion about the relation of collective to individual has long been deeply involved in “vectoring” (“involuting” more accurately) collective behaviors of scientists, their precursors and surrogates, as they ride their beamtimes and separate their data from their noise so as to create a worldview construct in their mirror image, a worldview construct analogically embodied in the institutional base employed by the corpus. Harp of Burma spent years ritualistically ridding what was once the battlefield of ghosts; electromagnetically speaking (as argued in MOON, Vol. 1, p. 259 and pp. 646-9, relative to autogenic brain discharges and neuronal constellation of unconscious collective gradients), this was likely more efficacious than the individual resurrections and collective (ac)counting counseled by Hedges. And the collective PTSD of the survivors would be most effectively addressed by re-visioning invariant properties of the institutional base (a very effective form of collective “eye-movement reprogramming”) by resolutely and cleanly following out clear implications of direct experience. The ghostly electromagnetic residue of collective constellation of the coming kill (source of the power over the individual in what Hedges refers to as “The frenzy of the crowd [that] is over-powering”, p. 174), a Mesmerism addressed after the fact by Harp of Burma, has its correlates in other natural processes. Since the 1970s, it has been known that magnetic field gradients in the vicinity (a matter of kilometers) of fault and epicenter change measurably in the period immediately before (I have seen this described in terms of hours) an earthquake. Some species of birds are particularly sensitive, but many animals have the ferrite flecks in brain required for such sensitivity (including humans, it has recently been discovered). Why so few humans cultivate this sensitivity is another matter. Once again in my opinion, implicating no one else, that is, if the prevailing worldview construct were not so resolutely maintained in mirror image, cascade theory of severe storm genesis would prevent “the experts” from so easily asserting that crustal dynamics of planet Earth have no relation to factors driving climate change and severe storm genesis. Cascade theory is a theory incorporating angular momentum exchange from macro- to micro-scale -- the macro including angular momentum carried by solar wind, and the micro including electromagnetic current injections into Earth's mantle -- the angular momentum thus carried very likely having its effects on plate tectonics. This is not to rule out “Jupiter Effects” and the like, but surely such is not the only way collective extraterrestrial influences can Platonically alter individual behaviors on Earth.
Bing, Bing, Bling! What's the difference between oligarchs on the left and oligarchs on the right? How they made their money? For decades, both classes have had their Showa Societies. On the left, such societies have poured billions into sponsoring crash capitalism in such a manner as to spawn a veritable tsunami of new oligarchs. But I thought crash capitalism was on the right, anarcho-capitalism; not on the left, anarcho-syndicalism. Maybe I'm confused! The big difference is that the Showa Research Institutes on the left have thrown in -- ketamine dreams of Cyberia (not Siberia) -- with Department of the Army and DARPA to develop the National Center for Virtual Reality Studies, while the Showa Research Institutes on the right have thrown in -- Just say no! coupled to The Passion -- with the Christian radio evangelists to promulgate the Principles of the National Polity (Kokutai no Hongi). This promulgation effort has been so successful, the oligarchs on the left are infuriated they didn't think of it first. So now the Showa Research Institutes on the left will be roving about to determine how to promulgate the Principles of the National Polity with their stamp of approval -- given that the agendas of left oligarchs and right oligarchs are indistinguishable, while only the preferred implementation methodologies vary somewhat. Meanwhile, off stage… march into global holocaust accelerates.
I'd say there is near-zero chance of improvement. The Hollywood-SF-Gates take on P2P/electronic-commons/VR is to use the new quantum-relativity-based technologies to shore up the foundering Cartesian-Newtonian institutionalization (be the We Are The World! Band-Aid gig socialistic or libertarian in orchestration), even to the extent of suborning quantum computing to the same effect -- not to create something wholly new, something a direct expression of quantum-relativity perspectives. Ketamined cyberiosis is a communicable social disease memed in Hollywood where the drug inculcates Weimar-youth-group awareness of states of identity transparency the nation-state denies normative access to; collective psychological projection dictates techno-development trajectory such that simulated access to the denied states of identity transparency can be attained by techno-human symbiosis; such unconsciously-mediated symbiosis is regressive, however, regression-in-service-to-the-larger-ego, i.e., entelechy of nation-state surrogate, and non-normative collective psychological printout is peaceful war and/or warful peace (providing variable frenzy access to collective identity states). Sontag semiotics of pornography and/or neocon semiotics of The Passion? There is no mentionable difference between the worldview of a George Soros and the worldview of a George Bush. The flailing energy foundations of Civilization X will be Bainbridged in like manner: only energy-source solutions compatible with Cartesian-Newtonian institutionalization will be cultivated. Bainbridging is a way of postponing acknowledgement of actual dimensions of the problem and deferring admission of culpability. Real solutions to global energy problems were buried in esoteric paradigm-conflict disputes carried out by actual fist fight in the back corridors of scientific conferences decades ago. Beaten down at a time when they could have had significant impact, resurrection -- were it to occur -- is already too late.
My bet has been that France will not stick it out with Germany, Russia, and China when petrowar goes to cusp. The Frog will do something analogous to what it did in World War II. Though French semiologie had its origins in Russia, the paradigm-conflict issues governing current events are deeper than Marxism vs. capitalism -- both of these contenders being fully within the compass of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm. Beginning in the late-'60s, specifically as an intelligence analyst focused on the Middle East at JFK Special Warfare Center in the period immediately before the Six-Day War -- on cultural considerations, not a geopolitical basis -- I forecast emergence of a Germano-Russian Bloc aligned to a Greater China (what others have subsequently projected as a “Mahayana Buddhist Bloc” incorporating Japan, unified Korea, and Vietnam). France, I felt, would vacillate. Actually, this framework of expectations began to edge into awareness while cultivating a Jungian perspective at AU's SIS, and studying “Foreign Policies of the Great Powers” under Abdul Aziz Said (writing “position papers” for various historical personalities placed in fictive circumstances: good training for visualizing cultural determinants of alternative futures). All the present-day talk about India-Iran alliance is very interesting in this context. Indic traditions have even greater resonance with m-logically-valued perspectives then do German, Russian, Chinese, or Japanese -- though, as elsewhere, the resonance is with the very old, in this case pre-Brahmanic (when Aryan was not yet separated into Iranian and Indian). Which traditions will and which traditions will not, at cusp, allow staying with a world construct based on falsification of the import of the Schrödinger wave-function? Probability amplitude or m-valued logics? We are talking here about event gradients in collective unconscious governing behaviors of nation-states (consciously rationalized in whatever fashion: a matter of no real interest). People are discombobulated by mix-mastering of cognitive dimensions they have been taught to separate because the psychological “buffers” used to stiffen the shoulder boards of their self-identity overcoats (personas) come under probing assault. Not my personal problem -- even if: thus, do people become obsessed with concrete particulars possessing no actual causal efficiency. The major complexity here is this: these non-Western traditions sundered the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm as contents of the “Great Books of the East” worked their ways into and within the European subliminal, while the colonial/post-colonial mass psychological complex continues to drive preoccupations with assimilating 18th- and 19th-century European perspectives, prerogatives, lifestyles, and institutionalizations -- proving that we can do “it” just as well or better than they can -- thus preventing potentially-resonant traditions from resonating with post-Cartesian-Newtonian possibilities across the full activity spectrum of the involved cultures. When planetary frenzy comes, how will the psychological chips fall? Dealing with this is not the same thing as accurately predicting it. And providing therapy for collective PTSD is by no means equivalent to treating PID, Pre-traumatic Indurate Dithering.
Let's be frank for once. In a global political system where there are no functional mechanisms for processing economic “externalities”, and economics is war by other means and war economics by other means, in making assessments it is useful to be adept at recognizing self-similar processes across scale levels (a skill chaos theorists ostensibly have mastered). If Time can characterize “The Rove Warrior” (Karen Tumulty, December 27, 2004-January 3, 2005) as having seen sooner than most “the political opportunities being created by demographic shifts” affecting Texas, for instance, then it is a mere matter of applying chaos theory skills to larger scale levels affected by demographic shifts driven by similar processes to see that The bin Laden Warrior saw sooner than most the political opportunities created by processes of economically forced-draft urbanization impacting upon his regional constituency. While CIA & Associates moves from one success to another -- Ukraine, say -- Al Qaeda & Associates similarly moves from one success to another (correctly losing every battle in order to win the war). Self-similar processes on scale levels trans-regional are simultaneously creating circumstances whereby the global insurgency against the very idea of the Cartesian-Newtonian nation-state system that will inherit Al Qaeda & Associates' more limited mandate is materializing on the GPS monitor from ephemeral echoes. Abruptly ending the rag trade quota system without first having in place an m-logically-valued global monetary system to process the involved “externalities” is a case in point. Far from equilibrium phase transitions ghost-ride the global demographic tsunami on boards fashioned by, say, the WTO: nature imitates not only Hollywood.
As you know, I have long predicted there would eventually be a Phoenix Global Central (PGC) and that it would be as successful as Phoenix was in Vietnam -- the only difference being that the level of such success would vary as to the geographical scale of application. I will now make another prediction. Just as Phoenix HELPED the communists with their purge of the southern VCI apparat (huge numbers of “political operators” being transferred countrywide into the military meat grinder prior to and immediately following Tet-'68) as the NFLSVN was systematically dismantled and re-staffed by the northern bo doi, again countrywide (beginning in MR5), in shift from the united front form of organization to the pre-government administrative format (which preceded implementation of the proto-government) in immediate aftermath of Tet-'68, so PGC will HELP AQ&A dismantle itself as the barrier of Islamism is finally breached and the global insurgency moves successfully into organization of a much larger non-sectarian recruitment base. PGC will be so successful at destroying AQ&A that the authorities will be proclaiming the war on global terrorism has been won! But the involved far from equilibrium organizational phase transition will not be publicly viewable for sometime after it has transpired, and the intelligence types will forever deny it occurred, even as the larger insurgency materializes out of thin air to the amazement of all observers. Every imaginable explanation, excepting that which actually transpired, will be offered to account for the new phenomenon. Long after Rumsfeld is gone, PGC will find itself not only running clandestine training ops domestically but assuming actual domestic responsibilities relative to an unprecedented national crisis. By appropriately modifying the definitions and judiciously distinguishing data from noise (information management), in such a war as this it is always possible to appear to win every battle. The ability to claim to be always the winner collapses only in the avalanche of endgame -- endgame in this case not having only to do with global insurgency, but nested inside of petrowar and all the rest. Nothing remotely like this will be suspected, let alone forecast, as, due to information management, all the experts and historians know how effective Phoenix was at eliminating the VCI. We now call this netwar MO and reference it to Contra vigilantes so as to distance it from post-Vietnam syndrome emotional residuals associated with hunter-killer CT teams. Nonetheless, there is nothing innovative involved in the netwar MO. Better technology brought to bear on a domain where technology is a minor variable. Even when they are reading superconductant-DNA fingerprints by satellite! not merely radiation signatures of GPS transmitters.
Should I be running around in the far reaches of n-dimensional manifolds, group theory, m-valued logics, black hole computers, counterhypercomplex number theory, Riemann hypothesis, Gödel numbers, and so on, or should I be -- given the coming global confabulation -- attending to the literary details of, say, James Hillman's A Terrible Love of War (Penguin, 2004)? I don’t' know. I really don't know. Given my peculiar personal constellation, where is the best effort to be put? Maybe this is not one of Kierkegaard's either/or's. Maybe a Diary of THE Seducer -- as war -- should be written by one Whitmanesque my-other-I-am or another. Maybe the two domains mentioned have to be brought together. James Hillman's effort is a great effort. A great effort, BUT, it simply doesn't ring true to me. This statement will exasperate many whom I know who have spent time on the battlefield -- even some of those who have spent much time on the battlefield. Far more time than I. The same WOMAN who threw her greatest accusation, You have no vanity!, also (lesser accusation) said that I approach my every day as if I were a fighter pilot going into a dogfight. True! True! But I took that as a compliment. Carrying death on one's shoulder, as Rilke well knew ( see “TimeWaste of Half-Ojects”), is not only a lifetime's endeavor, but is not of this world -- or, more accurately, not of this chronotopology. Hillman's book is wonderful. One of the best things I've read on the “subject” of war. STILL! It's upside down. He, for instance, cites René Girard to the effect that (p. 24) “The enemy provides the constellating image in the individual and is necessary to the state in order to collect individuals into a cohesive warring body.” This, I one-hundred-and-eighty-degrees disagree with. How could I possibly not understand such a commonsense idea? Let's hear from MOON's Thuy Tien (Vol. 2, pp. 273-4):
The mind grows demure for having demurred so often, so uselessly, so ineffectively, for having become so glutted with fetter and impede. Having seen the war from both sides was provoking, saddening, disheartening, was to drive the mind to shriek at the insanity behind the fact so raw, scream at the shilly-shally shiftless shimmy of the psyche causing it all. Her mother's little book of Buddhist metaphysics was truly understandable only in witness to death in war. The fear of death is not only the dread of losing one's being, but the fright and anguish at the prospect of denial, denial of what one has psychologically eaten, what one has introjected as part of the defining ambience of one's being: the cause, the beloved, the fatherland, the revered shibboleth. One reacts to attack on any of these as if one's very physical body was threatened with extinction. It is out of these that one makes one's being, not out of the actual attributes of being itself. The “delusion that the self is unitary and persisting”. Yes, that delusion, the delusion her mother had written of. One takes oneself as one somehow wholly separated, physically, in the nature of things, and psychologically, in spite of the social components of being. And into this separated being, this fantasy of a unitary and persisting subject, one introjects objects -- the cause, the fatherland, the beloved -- because the unity and persistence cannot inhere alone, being mere pretension. But the introjection of the object makes all that is not introjected: the enemy, perfidity, those who would deny one's pretension, the Judas one carries like a loi tung niem, a mantra. The very presence outside one's magic circle of introjection is a mortal existential threat, a potential murder, a casus belli. One's very way of apprehending self-being is itself war! Just being -- the way one is -- creates the enemy. Taking oneself as “unitary and persisting”, as wholly separate, is an act of war. THEM! as distinct from me. How many have been murdered for this, and this alone?
Thuy Tien's position is not Girard's position. War is not a failure of imagination, but a failure of proprioception.
Still, a failure of proprioception is not the “cause of war”. War has no causes. Thinking that war just MUST have causes is derivative of the failure of proprioception. It is a matter of the senses: sense perception. One attributes to oneself a self because of a failure of sensory comprehension, a failure of ontic awareness. The easiest “place” to see this is in fucking: normal sex. Overt SM is not even required (though for those of inordinately failed proprioception, its voluntary consensual employment might be approached as a useful form of physical education). The beloved “other” is the field of one's possible range of self-experience. One cannot explore that range absent presence of the “other”. But to the degree that the “other” is allowed to become the arbiter of the possible range of self-experience by imparted pleasure, to the same degree is that “other” a limitation on the very possibility of definition of self as distinct from “other”. One has to give up control over self to control by the “other” in order even to experience imparted pleasure. The “other” is the beloved enemy instantly as one claims separate self-existence. Love is war. War is love. This is beyond Love's Body, beyond Eros and Civilization. LoveWar is a matter of self-reference: murder is a form of suicide; suicide, a form of murder. To psychologically “eat” signifiers of the vanquished is to project attributes of self-definition. And self-reference is the foundation of m-valued logics. Antecedent-consequent relations are no part of the logical structure of m-valued logics -- the more so the higher the order of logical-value employed. And all such orders map onto n-dimensional manifolds. So here we are: no either/or. Vico. Giambattista Vico. When I came back from Vietnam, I did not follow the injunction of Chris Hedges (p. 12) given in his War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (Anchor, 2002): read Homer's The Odyssey. I read The Odyssey by Kazantzakis; I sent quotes back to my friends still in Vietnam. They found these quotes “Not very relevant”, as well they should have. And then I read Vico. Vico was a great gift made to me by my one-time roommate at AU's SIS: Michael Meisenburg (he will remember). “Read Vico,” he said. “You will love him.” And I did. Hillman mentions Vico (pp. 7-8) relative to archetypes and thematics. Suppress m-logically-valued modes of cognition, suppress animistic identity transparency, and the thematics of warfare emerge in compensatory relation. This is not a cause of war. When I later came across the “thematic evasion” type of “neutralization antagonizing forms of resistance” as explicated in Autogenic Therapy relative to autogenic brain discharges, I immediately thought of Vico (“Echo of the Mockingbird” is recommended here). And in my own self-originated therapy for PTSD, in the very early-'70s, I arrived at what, twenty years later, came to be called “eye-movement reprogramming”. I discovered this reprogramming in daily figure drawing from the nude model imagining the tip of my finger moving along HER curves as I tried ever more and ever more slowly to move the gaze smoothly in making Nicoliades' contour drawings -- so slow all sorts of discoveries were encountered about discrete properties of extra-ocular muscle functions (in the limit, the limit of time-slow-down). SHE conspired with me in that loft, as SHE was aware of what was going on. I knew I had to get into HER role in my self-definitional drama, if ever I was to comprehend combat, which I knew to be a form of sex, a category of love. SHE who must be believed, SHE, whichever SHE -- most usefully generic SHE (Tantric yoga) -- as beloved “other” was the only route into what I knew to be a proprioceptive failure. My personal Odyssey into the transpersonal via the person of the “other”. Hillman was a medic in World War Two; I was trained as a Special Forces medic. Such training has many “forms of uses” -- even if Swedenborg might find this formulation a bit strange. The NATO Handbook of Emergency War Surgery was placed on top of my footlocker each night at 3 a.m. as I lay down upon the bunk.
Tell you what I will do. I'll use Hillman as a way to illustrate how I move onto a different level. Analytical continuation (in the technical sense of calculus on n-dimensional manifolds). Hillman paraphrases (p. 5) Einstein to the effect that “problems cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that created them”. This refers to what Jung called “invoking the transcendent function” -- and nothing better could be recommended relative to the foundering energy bases of contemporary global civilization. Transcendent functions involve transcendental numbers, numbers which are non-algebraic. Vico's thematics are in Jung's archetypes which are often confused with a misinterpretation of Plato's ideal forms. Such forms are not archetypes; they are the archetypes-in-themselves (which are not archetypes). For an actual Platonist, there is no such thing as the “ideal chair” taught in Philosophy 101. One cannot understand this if one has not read into the neoPlatonists, who explicated it best. Plotinus and Proclus being exemplary. Hillman quotes Sartre (p. 16): “He who begins with facts will never arrive at essences.” What better illustration of how confused Sartre was? The fundamental premise of Existentialism is “Existence precedes essence”. Sartre must have forgotten his Existentialist credentials! Roger Penrose claims to be a Platonist, teaches ideal chairs; yet, he subscribes to Church's Hypothesis: “Calculable if and only if recursive”. The fundamental premise of Platonic idealism is “Essence precedes existence”. Penrose must have forgotten his Platonist credentials! As a freshman at AU's SIS, studying under Abdul Aziz Said, I moved onto a different level by challenging the notion “precedes” contained in the fundamental premises of Existentialism and Platonism. This was done while studying the structure of the international system of nation-states that analogically embodied implications of Newton's lower-order calculus and is directly implicated in mass warfare. Once the notion “precedes” is challenged, one moves decisively into higher-order analytical continuation on n-dimensional manifolds. The idea that ideal forms are to be found as ideal chairs is resident in carrying lower-order notions of identity into higher domains where they are inadmissible. Higher-order notions of identity are not either/or, not binary, not existent under the rules of traditional Aristotelian-Baconian logic. M-logically-valued notions of identity do not permit essential properties of an ideal chair, even of “chairness”. Such set-theoretical notions come into play only under the notion “precedes” as it applies to logic, ontology, and time. The holographic identity properties of transfinite sets have hardly even begun to be imagined by mathematicians resolutely avoiding implications of m-valued logics. The regular polyhedra were pneumonics, phylacteries for Platonic anamnesis -- not the ideal forms themselves. The learning that is remembering is in ontic awareness as solipsistic proprioception by all-that-is. Plato's philosopher used phylacteries as an aid to generative empathy with all-that-is. The essays on after-death states contained in Plato's Republic are essays on perspectives inherent to m-valued logics. Gödel discovered why “the modern aspect of mathematics” precludes explication of the archetypes-in-themselves. Incompleteness and undecidability not only lead into infinite regress in orders of logical value, they reveal that infinite regress is the nature of the case. If infinite regress is the nature of the case, self-identical numbers, which the modern aspect of mathematics presupposes, do not exist -- except under the binary order of logical-value. Self-identity is of the nature of “chairness”. Though the archetypes-in-themselves be mathematical relation-structures in the sense of Whitehead, they are not what Whitehead imagined mathematical relation-structures to be: Platonic mathematical relation-structures do not possess self-identity. The solipsism of all-that-is is in non-self-identical relations: Alan Watts' God playing hide and seek with himself; Jean Gebser's aperspectival; animistic identity transparency. Non-self-identical numbers are numbers under orders of logical-value other than the binary. Gödel numbers are primes numbered under the binary order of logical-value. Non-self-identical numbers are numbered Gödel numbers. Phylacteries were used as aids to anamnesis by Plato's philosopher because he had no intercourse with the numbered Gödel numbers which “frame” the archetypes-in-themselves. He required the intermediary of phylacteries because of his inability to rigorously codify the notion of non-self-identicalness. Archetypes are collective deposits, residues, of the archetypes-in-themselves -- signified by thematic contents of myths. Signification is transliteration under operator-time. In such transliteration the archetype-in-itself becomes -- becomes an archetype. Such becoming is like a locomotive moving down the tracks. The psychic event gradients are inescapable -- on the level of becoming. Identification with an archetype constellates inescapable gradients. Ask the Oriana Fallaci of A Man; ask Charlie Manson; ask Hitler: three identifiable levels of capture by an archetype. Warfare as social norm is in identification with such transliteration. Absence of warfare is in Platonic anamnesis, which for most men is an after-death state.
My suspicion is that only Wolfgang Luthe, had he been alive to read it, would have fully deciphered the degree to which the many micro-styles adopted by MOON are carbon copies of clinical histories of autogenic verbalizations by patients undergoing autogenic abreaction during processes of autogenic neutralization. At some point in the reading he would have stopped with a strange expression on his face indicating the moment of recognition. March of autogenic brain discharges (thematically ordered by the Centrencephalic Safety Discharge Mechanism) of the electrochemical records of chronic stress (altered quantum-wave frequency windows and waveforms of intraneuronal superconductant DNA) constellating PTSD: plot outline. And probably only Edmund Jacobson (apparent actual first creator of the EEG: denied a Nobel because of his “subjectivism” and commitment to “contentless awareness”) would have recognized how thoroughly the methods of autosensory observation taught in his laboratory during the 1920s and '30s suffused the novel. But Valentine Michael Smith would have had no problem scoping out the “fair witness” behaviors depicted; just as students of J. G. Bennett had no difficulty seeing how “Make moon in yourself!” informed thematics of The Moon of Hoa Binh (hoa binh being Vietnamese for peace). These statements may appear obscurational. I intend here, however, to be of more direct assistance -- in so little as spiritual assistance is possible. James Hillman's book, A Terrible Love of War, is a literary piece, even though he relied as much as possible on primary sources. Primary sources, however, remain “sources”: he is not writing from “inside” the experience he is attempting to phantom. And reporters like Chris Hedges (War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning) are in the wrong witness “position” from which to actually comprehend “high combat” -- unless they were combat-veteran soldiers before becoming combat-hardened reporters. No reporter understands combat, no matter how closely or how long he witnesses it. What are my credentials for making such statements -- given how little direct combat I actually experienced? Those who have the most elaborate experience of the inside of the experience do not, and never will, talk inside-to-inside with those who have never been inside. Such talk is impossible, so why even try? I saw some combat. I was wounded severely enough to spend six weeks in the hospital before being returned to Vietnam. But this was the least of it. I had a little over a month of weird night missions as the sole accompanying American. But this, too, was not the core from which real insider knowledge emerged.
Soon after I returned from Vietnam, my father questioned me curtly, and a bit testily, about what I had experienced there. He felt I had not reacted normally to the death of my mother. She died about three weeks before I was to rotate out of Vietnam and ETS. I hitchhiked across the Pacific on emergency leave, but arrived later than expected, suffering what Hillman uses the term automatisme anesthésiant to denote. This interpersonal father-son hiatus was exacerbated by the fact that, several years earlier, upon my telling both parents that I had volunteered for Special Forces, my mother had become hysterical and announced in a crying fit that she knew she would never see me again. As it turned out, not because I was to be killed: eldest son to military wife, short of husband and wife, there is no more deeply bonded relationship, Oedipal as it is. Her fusion into core of my being was inescapable, even in death. My “un-normal” reaction to my mother's death was displaced and all to be lived out in recurrent dream imagery spread over the coming decades: not publicly viewable. And I owe whatever creativity I possess to HER unreserved continuous presence. But the father-son hiatus was more complicated than that. Having gone through SF medic training and functioned for awhile as a surgical tech at Camp Zama Army Hospital, at the time of my return from Vietnam, I still had elaborate medical skills and considerable retention of medical information. Hearing my father's account of the circumstances of my mother's death, I suspected “physician error” on part of a military doctor at the base hospital. I found a way to gain access to her medical files and confirmed to my mind “physician error”. I never informed my father of this, as nothing beneficial could have come out of it. In response to his questioning, I gave a brief cryptic account of my Vietnam combat, mostly of the night missions -- which had come at the beginning of my tour. His reaction was: “Well, clearly, you turned out to be a brave man.” He had been back from Vietnam himself only a little over a year when I returned. He had seen probably hundreds of times the amount of direct combat I had -- in three wars plus a cold war. His first involvement in the Vietnam war coming as early as the re-supply effort to Dien Bien Phu mounted from Ashiya AFB, Japan. In the air and on the ground -- Berlin airlift and highly dangerous air/sea rescues in the foulest of weather not the least among them, including untold hours dodging flak over wartime Germany, and shot-down, lost and presumed dead, for three months while making his sole-survivor way uncaptured, but shepherded by the Resistance, across occupied France. I still do not know actual details. He talked about his experiences to me, only several times a couple of months before he died quietly in his own bed while in his early-'70s. Times, dates, facts and figures only. Mostly to finally confirm my childhood memories, and later speculations about what had at the time been classified activities I had been exposed to and later felt I had come to understand. I did not qualify, in his eyes, for inside-to-inside talk. Objectively speaking, I was not in his class relative to the issues at hand. I knew this and never actually tried to enter that class; I quit Special Forces in the last week of Dog Lab without hesitancy or regret when circumstances deemed that the right choice. He never second-guessed that decision. Moreover, he was incapable of insightful such talk, being a high mesomorph with the underdeveloped introspective capabilities characteristic of his generation of Americans. Had he been different, he would have been dead. On certain levels we understood each other very well. My credentials for making statements about combat mostly reside in my experience before going to Vietnam, the only place where I saw direct combat.
Being my mother's son, I was born an ectomorphic Gemini -- in many ways HER twin, generic HER: self-re-entry, birthing as re-birthing -- on Flag Day of 1945, born to an American bomber pilot and career officer. I grew up -- no different from most of my military brat friends -- being constantly, cloyingly, assessed, prodded, criticized, provoked, questioned as to probable sexual preference, and so on by a continuous stream of hardened combat veterans basking in the aftermath of… whatever, many things. In earnest from age four or five, the way I sat in a chair, the placement of my extremities and particularly the hands, the way I rose from a chair, the way I walked, the part of the foot first hitting the ground, my shoulder stance while standing, the set of my chin, eye behaviors, especially eye behaviors, my hair style, the placement of my belt buckle, my choice in footgear, table manners, not so much as a “square meal” but the tilt of the cup, practice sessions at the O-club, sitting still forever without speaking unless spoken to, food likes and dislikes, the type of friends I chose -- every conceivable detail of personal behavior -- was marked, constantly under the scrutiny of so many, his peers as well as HER peers, read as an indicator of the probability as to whether or not I would make the grade, qualify for membership. This stream of veterans -- male and female -- attended to these matters also relative to themselves, but did so according to the prescribed forms. The way the general rises from the chair! Required: skill at self-observation. The self-awareness, the self-possession and smooth-noodle movements of a stuntman in a circus. Breaking starch in the mornings. But for my me it was different. My I quietly questioned the prescribed forms and thereby, inadvertently, found itself constantly cultivating the “position” of a witness state quite different from that of a combat reporter. My I had started a journal of self-observations well before leaving high school. My I made decisions in movement between stations (stations of the cross?) as to what sort of person it would be at the next station: freedom to change the personality because of no continuity in the peer group. My I became, not only skilled at self-observation, but a witness to the inside dimensions, those non-viewable (except through the “Plexiglas wall”). My I was in stress-oriented training from infancy, spread across the continents, moving through 23 schools before it graduated from high school. “Capt. Pensinger's residence, Larry speaking.” This was a lie from the beginning. Hidden meanings everywhere, in every commonplace. Whose residence? Larry had no residence, no habitus to call his own. Very early on my I had gone incognito; it could never actually have been speaking into that phone. That's not AWOL, mind you; my I never went AWOL: sign of a lack of discipline. But it tried on every sort of persona and became an adept at moving between roles. Toying at death, of a sorts. Moving away is kind of dying, isn't it? Especially moving away from HER, the little hers of my peerage, her become generic HER. Learn to carry death on your shoulders. People barely noticed, as was intended. Thus was my I well prepared for entry, when, at the age of nine, it was introduced to the identity transparency inherent to animistic states of consciousness, those states inculcated by the rural Japanese women who took it under their wings. Generic HER. Though we may presently be OCCUPIED, that does not prevent us from occupying the little toe-headed foreign boy who has brought himself to our tiny defenseless hamlet, taking over the house-garden we built 75 years ago in shadows of the Shinto shrine shading the phallic stone god COVERED by the intertwined threads of the sacred rope: signifying our control over the genetic patrimony. It was at this time that my I first began running covert missions against the opposition -- herein upon the Japanese MPs guarding the base perimeter -- running mission after mission through enemy lines, breaching the fence line, into the dark caves, off-limits and ordnance-filled, nestled under the verge of the flight line from whence the flying boxcars took off in droves for their sojourns to Dien Bien Phu: Yul Brenner's Flight From Ashiya. “Ya” is feminine, you know. Ashiya of the paddy-fed and rivered watercourse pouring into the Sea of Japan. Cross-border behaviors of the imaginary last samurai: the samurai not a ronin is not a samurai. Attend to the click-clicks of the phallic shinai (bamboo swords) -- after your judo lessons, after your flower arranging lessons along with HER. One role assumed was that of fawning boy and eager-beaver understudy constantly bubbling forth questions: questions for THE Bomber Pilot, THE Fighter Pilot, THE SAC Pilot, THE U2 Pilot, THE Test Jockey. One thing was unmistakable: there was ever so much to learn. Tell me about pilot fixation syndrome. Can that be overcome through use of a flight simulator? Those simulators my daddy is developing at Wright-Pat? Hmmm. Could my I develop a flight simulator on the inside? Is pilot fixation syndrome all about the “Plexiglas wall”?
The primary physiological function of the tiny extraocular muscles is not to make sight possible; that function is secondary. The primary physiological function of the laryngeal muscles is not to make speech possible; that function is secondary. Study the congenitally blind, the congenitally dumb. The primary function, in both cases, is facilitation of associative thought and content-full awareness. Edmund Jacobson demonstrated this over and over in his electrophysiology laboratory at University of Chicago, publishing his findings in many papers throughout the 1930s. Biology of the emotions: rage, even, the rage, for instance, accompanying a testicle wound resulting from incompetence of a superior officer. Mental associations are correlated one-to-one with residual tension patterns (very near zero action-potential) in the extraocular and laryngeal muscles: rhyme and reason of eye-movement reprogramming in treatment of PTSD. There are no closed circuits in the brain: cross-border behaviors, breaching the line, the arbitrary lines of functional localization. Homunculus for which I? Without special training, no one is capable, even in deep sleep, of relaxing that deeply. Transit from the egotropic to the trophotropic. At age 18, my I discovered Jacobson's 1911 paper wherein he described in detail the autosensory-observation methods taught to “fair witness” experimental subjects in his laboratory. Here was another occasion for the fawning boy to become an eager-beaver understudy. Which I is that?
The why of war is not the same thing as the cause of war. It's a rare person right off the block who can do early morning runs mile after mile in ankle-deep water carrying sandbags on his back. Sports help, but making that run is not a mere matter of physical conditioning or learning how to get second wind at football practice -- particularly for all those who are not high mesomorphs. Don't ask the mesomorph! And there are many stages beyond such runs -- stages of learning the types of autohypnosis required to overcome force of the suggestions received in the heterohypnosis which is everyday life under governance of the polis. Relative to the run, one learns runner fixation syndrome well beyond second and third winds. Whereas the pilot wants to avoid fixation (one kind, at least), the runner wants to cultivate it. Fix the gaze, rhythm entrain on any repetitive stimulus, visual, auditory, or tactile: tap of the leg with its each lift; go visually diffuse on the leg movements proceeding before you, count breaths, click your tongue to the beat of your heart. Whatever. Enter “second sound” through your personally-discovered form of Vipassana. Your you will know when it gets there, as it no longer has to try. Beyond second winds, without the effort of an I, the body will run until it has a heart attack. Leave it to its business; the presence of your I is not required. Your you WILL be summoned when needed. Where to learn about this, short of actual entry, is from the exemplars, those who receive the most elaborate training before, during, and after entering the theater of war. If war is a failure of proprioception, a failure of ontic awareness, these guys will know the most about this failure, even if they don't know they know. It's often like that. Though percepts in combat are heightened, clarified, lucid-dream images, propriocepts are -- not diminished -- transformed, twisted onto the imaginary plane out of real-number whole-integer dimensions. The film script to Oliver Stone's movie about the sniper in Bosnia was not written by a master sniper, but by a filmmaker with a left political orientation and a moralistic cant. The film possesses no reductive phenomenology, exhibits no evidence of immersion in the practice thereof. Mere message mongering. Being after whys, one wants inside the practice. Wanting an actual end to war brings being after whys. Inside the practice, the sniper is not distanced, psychologically isolated. That's looking through the wrong end of the scope, the wrong way through the cameraman's telephoto lens. Dark tunnel vision of PTSD. This is not the master sniper. Looking through the right end of the scope, the master sniper is up close, up so close he is inside, inside every aspect of the physical surround. He's animistic -- otherwise, he's dead, and not a master sniper. I do mean INSIDE. Generative empathy is beyond mere empathy, fellow feeling, compassionate resonance, external considering. In generative empathy perception merges with proprioception: inner touch. Out there as opposed to in here? What does that mean? The master sniper has mastered many stages of autohypnosis beyond that of the run before getting there, there at master sniperhood. He may not come up with that explanation, but if you are permitted to speak inside-to-inside with him, he will find himself thinking long and hard on the matter. You think Charlie B. created Delta Force? He created the circumstances within which the generation I trained with could create Delta Force. I never served with them, but that was my choice, because I was more after whys than hows: a different track, no prescribed path to follow. Group behaviors are just the beginning: boot camp, AIT, jump school, the months of Training Group before specialty training, movement to Group, cross-training, pre-mission training, in-country orientation, and so on and so on. The first 15 jumps are group behaviors, chest to back, stomping on the floor, pushed out the door. You can't say no. Part of an organism in motion. Early stages of overcoming heterohypnosis, before being explicitly introduced to the various forms of autohypnosis. Jumping out of an aircraft is a crazy thing to do, counter to everyday heterohypnotic effects. Autohypnosis is a form of inner counter-work, a form of detachment according to Zen (bushido). Roll your own chute. In Group, you learn to detach from the group, without detaching from the group: one of the koans of the practice. Jumping a jet, a C141 starlifter, with only two jumpers in the cavernous cargo hold is not a group behavior. Free fall is another stage of autohypnosis. Letting Go (Benoit) of that damned I. HALO, another stage. Cut loose from the risers of group entrainment by entering some other kind of collective. Which group, the one out there or the one in here? How is that? Why is that? What is this animism of the master sniper? Learning at the rod and gun clubs of Ft. Sam, of Bragg, to handle a Browning Hi-Power with a trigger worked by a National Match marksman is learning NOT to see, not to need to look. If your you looks, it's too late. Not looking means learning about the primary function of the extraocular muscles. IT looks; your I is placed on autopilot -- as are your eyes. Close approach to contentless awareness achieved through differential relaxation in high-stress environments. This is not the thousand-yard stare through the wrong end of a telephoto lens, the lens of PTSD. No-self in shooter fixation syndrome. VR is just a tech-aid, an aid to autohypnosis. The Zen part; that's no metaphor. You see where this is leading, don't you? Into psychological states of voluntary dissociation. Mastery over those states: animistic identity transparency, a form of generative empathy with the physical surround. Paradoxical? That's one of the koans. No loss of time, like with the hysteric. Cross-temporal bridges -- between I's. Quantum relative-state without the thermodynamic constraint imposed by linear-time. A huge gain in the time required by slowing that time down: relativistic effects. Changes in time rate perception or the local time-pattern itself? Information overload? Not in time-slow-down. Time-shape. Here we are. Converging upon m-valued logics on n-dimensional manifolds spread by autogenic brain discharge across the cortex. Phase space for rhythm entrainment under various kinds of special service operators. Involuntary dissociation is a phasing problem in the hypertime. Mastery of rhythm entrainment INSIDE of the practice is time-slow-down at the moment of contact.
See the attraction? This is “high combat”. No low game. The philosophers just talk about it. Like the yogi, we (non-coercive “we”) actually do it. “God help me I do so love it,” says the Patton of the film, as quoted by Hillman on the first page of his book. But is this the why of war? Whys are much deeper. Much more INSIDE the practice. Everybody knows this is “all fucked up”, but that's not the issue. Why, where is the why? This cultivation of killing in order to enter spiritual spaces. The wild blue yonder. Been there? Why not enter spiritual spaces without killing in order to get there? Why not, indeed? This is the real realm of the why of war. Are the spaces entered in this fashion actual spiritual spaces, or just simulacra? Pilots talk of “wet thrust”. Listen to THE Test Jockey talk about this. Immediately before hopping on the plane to Vietnam, I had a week of camping in the high Sierras with a Hughes test jockey, going from one remote hot springs to the next, discussing this. Years before the camping trip, this test jockey, also a National Match marksman, was an extremely skilled aviator who walked away from a max-stress test-flight crash in total amnesia of the event -- before collapsing 24 hours later upon remembering. Or listen to U2 pilots talk about playing with the “ground effect” of the aircraft during placement of the pogos. There is every kind of sexual metaphor. But, as we can surmise from the above, sex and even religion are epiphenomenal -- not mere associations, but associations nonetheless. What about those associations mediated by the extraocular and laryngeal muscles? If there is a failure of proprioception, a failure of ontic awareness, how are those muscles involved? Nirvana is a place you don't get to above zero action-potential. Actual contentless awareness, not just a close approach, is at zero action-potential. Everything else you might do or non-do just gets you to that zero. And then there is the set of zeros: no-sound levels inside of no-sound levels. But behavioral psychology, experimental psychology, mainstream psychiatry say there is no such thing as contentless awareness, no “bare percept”, no psychological condition of no-self -- and if there were, it could only be absolute nihil, an inner wasteland, involutional psychotic reaction, catatonia. Sufficient cause, not too long ago, for unilateral, non-dominant electroconvulsive therapy. Not only is there no contentless awareness, there is no actual self-observation, only retroflexion posing as self-observation. Actual self-observation would involve voluntary dissociation, which does not happen because dissociation involves “loss of time” as one autonomous complex replaces another without capacity for retroflexive awareness between autonomous complexes (an awareness only the ego complex is capable of in absence of an autonomous complex). Nor is there such a thing as a gran mal seizure without loss of consciousness. Spiritual spaces are ruled out; it's right there in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual quoted by Hillman on PTSD (I know, I used to ghost-write papers for a clinical neurologist). And because of this ruling posted in the Manual, Hugh Everett's “Relative-State Interpretation” of quantum mechanics was censored by his preceptor with the assistance of Niels Bohr and reformulated relative to John von Neumann -- Everett being sent off to the Weapons System Evaluation Group, the Pentagon.
In this psychiatric context, it is wise to consider that the why of war has more directly to do with love than with sex. The proverb says “All is fair in love and war” not all is fair in sex and war. Sex is derivative, secondary. It is also well worth noting that the message in this proverb is not part of the wisdom transmitted in the Jewish and Christian “Proverbs” of the Bible. The term “generative empathy” used above is a technical medical term; it is not common parlance. The denotations of “generative empathy” are beyond the usual connotations of the German “Einfuhlung” and the Japanese “amae” -- both of which, though carrying their unique culture-bound “senses”, are more accurately expressed in English by the common sense of simple “empathy”. Witnessing an ox being beaten by a whip, welts rose on the back of Mayer Baba. This is closer to “generative empathy” than to “empathy”. So how can it reasonably be said that THE Master Sniper experiences a state of “generative empathy”? He does not die in empathic resonance with the victim as that victim dies as a result of the bullet he sent on its way. Let's look at that. Is the “spiritual state” of THE Master Sniper an authentic spiritual state or mere simulacrum? And if it is mere simulacrum, what does that tell us about the why of war? You cannot find the term “generative empathy” in most medical dictionaries; you have to go to a good psychiatric dictionary. “Generative empathy” means, essentially, the direct experience of the state of another. In a state of generative empathy one experiences the experience of another, directly, immediately, as one experiences one's own experience. This psychological state is classified a symptom of psychopathology; it is regarded an indication of psychosis. How is psychological “identification” distinguished from “empathy”; how is “empathy” distinguished from “love”? Why is all fair in love and war, not sex and war. What is common to love and war that is not, in turn, common to sex? Do we say, “I fell in sex”? No, but we say, “I fell in love”. “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you”: Leon Trotsky. In the folk wisdom of the ages, love and war are treated as something that “happens” to you, not something you “do”. All is fair in love and war because your you has no voluntary control. Witches were burned at the stake, not because they were regarded in a state of “identification”, but because they were regarded “possessed”. Why are witches predominantly female, warlocks predominately male? The Woman Who Made Love to Men to Take the War Out of Them, not the woman who warred with men to take sex from them -- at least not until recently.
“I always have recuntnized the cuntditionality of your cuntsent [Derek directly quoting Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, to parody their parodying], Miss Beauchamp: my projections are a function of your identifications no less than your projections are a function of my identifications no less that my identifications are a function of your projections no less than your identifications are a function of my projections. You have seen diagrams of village organization based on cross-cousin marriages, haven't you, Liana?” (MOON, Vol. 1, pp. 4-5)
The quaternary depicted in Jung's The Psychology of the Transference is an account of village organization similar to that described in Evans-Pritchard's Nuer Religion (referred to by Hillman) -- only in the Jungian case the “village” is intrapsychic and the “cousins” are the intrapsychic contrasexual imagos, Anima and Animus (the quarternary being doubled to Cayley's 8-tuples when introversion and extroversion are factored in). My declared major at AU's SIS was African Area Studies, and I weaseled my way into a 6-hour graduate seminar on African systems of kinship and marriage. This was forty years ago, when I first began reading into Jung. The decision to quit college and volunteer for Special Forces came in the middle of that semester, while in midst of these studies. I quit college, not merely to go to Vietnam, but specifically to go into Special Forces. I enlisted “Airborne unassigned”, as you could not enlist directly for Special Forces. Let's hear from Trinh T. Minh-ha (Woman, Native, Other):
A critical difference from myself means that I am not i, am within and without i. I/i can be I or i, you and me both involved… 'I' is, itself, infinite layers. [Emphasis in original]
Cixous and Clément pose a central question related to the why of war:
And all these pairs of opposites are couples. [Emphasis in original] Does that mean something? Is the fact that Logocentrism subjects thought -- all concepts, codes, and values -- to a binary system, related to “the” couple, man/woman?
What is generative empathy, as distinguished from love? “I/i can be I or i, you and me…” Forget the “both involved”. “Both involved” is not generative empathy; it is indicative of a pulling back from fullness of the case: fullness being utter “identity transparency” -- if there actually is “infinite layers”. “Both involved” is hyperventilation at orgasm, orgasmic whipstall -- which is precisely what the experience of “high combat” is (not “is like”). This is very far from what Wilhelm Reich called “a fully-potent orgasm”, and an expression of “the war between the sexes”, not fullness of love between the sexes. Ever hear the moan of a woman in orgasmic whipstall? Ever hear the moan of death on the battlefield? Can you distinguish them? I can't. But that is not the why of war; it is derivative, secondary. “Derivative” in the precise mathematical sense of the term, I eventually will argue, precisely so as wave-functions map over n-dimensional manifolds spread by autogenic brain discharge across the cortex. “Sex is an absolute form of bodily approach,” says Ueno Chizuko (“The Technology of Love”, Kyoto Journal, 18, 1991), authoress of Sukato no Shita no Gekijo (Theater Beneath the Skirt), an anthropological analysis of the fixation on women's panties. Is sex an absolute form of bodily approach, as Ueno Chizuko argues from her Marxist-metaphysical-materialism perspective on commodity fetishism? Soiled panties sold on the rack or over the internet by high school girls, along with their snapshots and signatures, are commodities, one must countenance -- even if the IPO of soiled panties is also like the dog placing a signature on the fire hydrant. I am certain that the women of the traditional Japanese hamlet I lived in for three years as a child would not have regarded sex an absolute form of bodily approach. For one thing, they didn't wear panties. This was a fact of everyday life frequently in public view. For another, mizu-age, ritual defloration with egg white upon the stone god (harigata or dildo) of the Shinto shrine was still performed in this hamlet at that time. I did not witness it, of course, but I certainly was told about it by my 17-year-old ama. Such things I forgot, but they came back to me in a literally staggering flood instantly as I stepped off the plane onto the soil of Vietnam: the smell of Asia! Smell keys memory. All the old “planting rituals” were still intact in that Japanese hamlet, the little rice paddy having not yet left the big rice paddy. Study Japanese porno movies; conduct “traffic analysis” upon them. How often is THE Woman seen moving her own legs? Almost always are those legs moved for her, positioned, placed by THE Man. In high arousal THE Woman cannot move her legs; she is inert: psychological paralysis expressed as physical paralysis: displacement. In modern Japan, this is exploited in the context of SM: a type of “referred pain”. In traditional Japan, this was because THE Woman was fully in a trance state resonating with wave-functions mapped over n-dimensional manifolds spread by autogenic brain discharge across the cortex, not in whipstall pulling back from the impress of those wave-functions. This, of course, is not the petit mal orgasm of modern life. Mudras, ritual dance forms, all across Old Asia, had their stylistic origins here in stereotypic patterns of trance seizure: “derivatives” of the wave-functions mapped over n-dimensional manifolds spread by autogenic brain discharge across the cortex.
Cixous' and Clément's couples couple. How is that? “I/i can be I or i, you and me…” Self-reference. The self-referential propositions of m-valued logics. But here the I/i -- self-reference -- is immediately transformed into a decompositional involute: I or i, you and me: and/or, the binary-logic truth-value matrix, the tableau of coupled couples. Even in a binary world, a group thing is possible -- much to the dismay of some. A group thing like the sexual daisy chain or the combat of massed warfare. How do we understand this transformation in logic from the self-re-entered to the binary-involute mosaic? Even the self-re-entry of the mother-son -- and most especially the mother-son under Japanese amae (where, remember, traditionally, in conception the mother was in resonant trance seizure, and in natural childbirth under endogenous neurotransmitters in a state of status ecstasy -- s. ecstasus, not s. epilepticus). Ever seen, in a Vietnamese village under attack, childbirth transpire with the mother in status epilepticus? Special Forces medics had to deal with this. Often successfully dealt with it under field conditions! Decoding this transformation in logic is a cryptanalytical problem. Does it have anything to do with the why of war? “Infinite layers”, says Minh-ha. The definition of a denumerable transfinite set is any set with the same cardinality as one of its proper subsets. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts; the part is the whole -- infinite layers, the infinite layers of painter(ess) Rice Pereira's “layered transparent”, the layered transparent of the full identity transparency characteristic of generative empathy. Rice Pereira produced a book on what she called “the transcendental formal logic of the infinite”. That which is unconscious can emerge into consciousness. We have all experienced that. Aha! Sudden realization. The act of creation. An epiphany. Petit mal Satori. But what about gran mal Satori? What is the difference between generative empathy and love? Don't THE Lovers desire to become one, not just “as one”, not just “both involved”? And isn't the inevitable tragedy of “true love” -- death of the lovers, according to the classical form -- a consequence of their attempt to create a “possible world logic” that is impossible? That possible world logic they try to create in their life-world is generative empathy: the direct immediate experience of the experience of another. All is fair in love and war. Attempt? Try? Why do the lovers attempt and try when love is something that “happens” to them, not something they “do”? Traditionally, music was sacred ritual, not pumped into every workspace, every conveyance. Today, the omnipresent popular love song cloyingly exhorts all aspiring lovers to make the attempt, to try… what? To create an interstate of consciousness the psychiatric establishment, indeed, the whole community, tells them is psychotic! Right there in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. In love as in war. Sex is secondary, petit morte, the little death.
This is only one schizophenogenic Batesonesque double-bind: no part of an ecology of mind. You can find many more. They all conform to the same general principles. Moreover, all of this “happens” in association with the brain -- a brain, we are told, that is only a binary processor. But what if, by virtue of I/i, self-reference, that is, the brain were also an m-logically-valued processor, a processor of quantum phase-digits where wave-functions are mapped over n-dimensional manifolds spread by autogenic brain discharge across the cortex. How would one go about gaining direct immediate conscious access to that? Quoting from above:
…being constantly, cloyingly, assessed, prodded, criticized, provoked, questioned as to probable sexual preference, and so on by a continuous stream of hardened combat veterans basking in the aftermath of… whatever, many things. In earnest from age four or five, the way I sat in a chair, the placement of my extremities and particularly the hands, the way I rose from a chair, the way I walked, the part of the foot first hitting the ground, my shoulder stance while standing, the set of my chin, eye behaviors, especially eye behaviors, my hair style, the placement of my belt buckle, my choice in footgear, table manners, not so much as a “square meal” but the tilt of the cup, practice sessions at the O-club, sitting still forever without speaking unless spoken to, food likes and dislikes, the type of friends I chose -- every conceivable detail of personal behavior -- was marked, constantly under the scrutiny of so many, his peers as well as HER peers, read as an indicator of the probability as to whether or not I would make the grade, qualify for membership.
Attention to every last detail. Reinvestment of attention into automatized functions. Practice, THE Practice. Turning attention cathexes back upon themselves: self-reference in phasic activation, so as to facilitate “autogenic shift” in the base state of tonic activation. Harnessing the arousal-activation continuum. This is about brain function, functions of the brain. Reinvestment of attention deautomatizes automated functions. Automated functions are binary functions, couples coupling. Deautomatized functions are… what? Derivatives! In analytic continuation on n-dimensional manifolds we employ group theory, not couples coupling. The “Plexiglas wall” came upon me in preadolescence, cusped in post-adolescence, and continued intermittently until I had a fully-conscious gran mal seizure at age 27. Though there has been much autogenic discharge activity since then, the “Plexiglas wall” never returned. “Bright-light states”, every kind of photism, auditory hallucinations, taste polymorphism, cross-modal translations of sensory dimensions. I was thrust into THE Practice at age four or five. What is the “Plexiglas wall”? What is it really? Schizoid de-realization, yes. Tunnel vision, yes. Fugue state, no. I never fugued, never went into “pilot fixation syndrome” from (proprioceptive) information overload, because time was on my side: time-slow-down. Relativistic effect. I could always disengage, re-realize, because I had the time. No instantaneous far-from-equilibrium phase transition. This was a practice spread over long stretches of time: decades. I had only rare normal headaches, no migraines, therefore, no migraine hallucination. I was hyper-aggressive, yes -- intellectually aggressive, not physically or emotionally. What is the “Plexiglas wall”, really? It's the imaginary plane, the plane of imaginary numbers, the first imaginary plane encountered of the “layered transparent” -- the layered transparent of the “transcendental formal logic of the infinite”. Approach that plane consciously, in immediate, direct awareness and the binary mind wants to blackout, wants to fugue. I did not fugue because I was in THE Practice; I had instilled into me the necessary discipline not to fugue. I had that discipline by osmosis, from my father, from the whole environment in which I was reared. I just used it in a different way than he did, than THEY did. Oh, sure, I struggled with that plane, with that “wall”, struggled to understand what it was (no one could tell me), struggled to gain mastery over it, struggled not to be mastered by it. This is not a mere metaphor, a case of projective identification, an example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. It is such to the contemporary neurologist, the contemporary neuropsychiatrist. It was not so to a Plato. The archetypes-in-themselves are m-logically-valued mathematical relation-structures. Take your choice: Plato or the contemporary neurologist? The Moon of Hoa Binh is a chronicle of that struggle. The “moon” of The Moon of Hoa Binh, the tympanum of the fractal drum of creation, is the unit circle on the complex plane become a cosmological clock within a cosmological clock within a cosmological clock. Clocks as waves, waves as clocks. Biological clocks as wave-functions mapped over n-dimensional manifolds spread by autogenic brain discharge across the cortex.
Self-organization for war is a regressed social analogue of disallowed dimensions of organic brain function. A human population corpus can synergistically metareference n-dimensional brain functions in the ritual forms of its life-world, or it can block them and thus facilitate the tropes of death in war. Ask not only for whom the bell tolls, for whom the drum sounds; ask who is responsible. Who? Look in the mirror! Can't give “carte blanche to the brain”? Then there WILL be war.
Insurgency wars are not won by winning battles; they are won by sustaining the capacity to lose the next battle. Vietnam's most recent war of national liberation began in the late-1840s when Old Ironsides, responding to cultural barriers to trade, cannonaded Da Nang killing several hundred people. That war was not won until it destroyed the gold-exchange mechanism of the Bretton-Woods monetary system 125 years later.
Of course Hillman's book is useful; I'm not saying it isn't. He has plumbed the literature. I'm only saying the book (A Terrible Love of War: Penguin, 2004) is not an inside account. For instance, the discussion of a red fog over the battlefield provided on pages 80-82. Too much writing is involved to recount or fully quote Hillman, so you will just have to refer to the pages indicated. Hillman quotes Ernest Junger: “The monstrous desire for annihilation, which hovered over the battlefield, thickened the brains of the men in a red fog.” Hillman then connects this to a statement by Patton maintaining that what is sought in war is “analogous to our search for the soul”. The men “saw red”, Hillman observes, and he then connects this to blood. First of all, the red “thickening” the brains of the men is not blood red; it is cornelian red-orange. Choice of the word “thickened” was a value judgment made by Junger as he wrote about the event after the fact and in a different state of consciousness. Ask anyone who has “seen” this and he will confirm that it is not blood red; it has nothing to do with blood. This is referred to at quite a few locations in MOON. This particular red is a red the Japanese have much experience of. Harp of Burma returned to Burma from Japan soon after end of the war -- one can be quite sure -- because of this particular color of red. His purpose was to clear the battlefield of “ghosts”: that's how it is translated into English. Patton's use of the term “soul” is more accurate, but the Judeo-Christian sense of the word would lead the reader astray, for this has nothing to do with discrete entities. That's why the agency “thickening” the brains is compared to “fog”. And cornelian is not the only color seen. Many colors are seen. If one wished to penetrate the “meanings” of the colors, one would have to study Goethe, Annie Bessant, the literature on the color fields which spontaneously appear in the visual field in association with autogenic brain discharges. The more skilled a person is at autosensory observation, the more he will be able to observe of what it is he is experiencing, and the more his report will fall into the nature of that provided by a “fair witness”. Hillman (p. 78) quotes Levinas: “War destroys the identity of the same”. This is an utter inversion of the case! The final word in the sentence should be “selfsame”, not “same”. The “monstrous” (Junger again making a value judgment after the fact) annihilation the men seek is eradication of selfsameness, being me-and-only-me (writ large in Judeo-Christian tradition to: I am that I am), being the same as myself: this is not sought in physical death, but in a state where death is beside the point, where they can't possibly kill me, where I know I can't be killed: because I am in eternity (hence, could never have been and therefore cannot not be). See the quotes provided by Hillman on page 79 for examples: absolutely commonplace proprioceptive input regarding dissolution of the claim to selfsameness, the abandonment of the claim to absolute separateness. The more one doubts validity of these claims (which, in fact, are artifacts of prescriptive enculturation and the associated glutamaturgic neuronal etching which blocks conscious access to m-logically-valued field-effect processing), the more one is driven again and again back to the battlefield; for the greater the doubt becomes, the more absolute the existential confirmation required to quench it. This is the central koan, the central double-bind faced in “high combat”. Physical death is the only resolution (on the battlefield). Coloristic deified time, as Derek designates it in MOON. The “color of time”, as the Vietnamese poet Derek remembers, writes. Cognitively twisting out of real-number dimensions onto the complex plane, and thence full into the layered transparent, all the phase transitions are chromodynamic. In “high combat” this involves not only long-range phase correlations between neurons, but also between brains undergoing extremely intense autogenic abreactions extensively preprogrammed by the repetitions of training. The longer the training, the more intense the training, the greater the integrity of small unit cohesion, the more the long-range phase correlations at cusp of contact, and the greater the spontaneous coordination of action independent of percept, propriocept, and thought. The given color correlates with the range and distribution over the cortex of the neurons involved in the same phase (one definition of color). These phase correlations are as to one or another order of “imaginary time”, one or another degree of “eternity”. The quantum-relativistic brain in relative-state with other quantum-relativistic brains. Not just time-slow-down; linear-time stop. Indeed, not the color of time; the colors of time: chromodynamics of the instant, as Derek says in MOON. The “fog” is in the field of the time.
Like most male Jungian analysts, Hillman confuses the “archetypal figure” with the “archetype”, which he does not distinguish from the “archetype-in-itself”. Jung, being a male Jungian analyst, was himself somewhat guilty of this, which can be particularly easily seen in his generalizations to political theory. Jung retained the Freudian notion of sublimation as the basis of civilization (in equal measure to Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse). The female Jungians in general, and Maria Louise von Franz in particular, did a far better job. The “archetypal figure” signifies the “archetype” which is the collective behavioral gradient (curvature configuration) emergent (constellated) as a mathematical involute of the “archetype-in-itself” (a mathematical relation-structure in “imaginary time”). The “complex” in the personal unconscious is a marker of the “archetype” (behavioral gradient) and a point-center for involutory decompositional (quantum) action on the archetype-in-itself. Collections of complexes are “propositions” within the collective unconscious. Transfinite collections of such propositions are the archetypes-in-themselves. A complex is a numbered Gödel number. The propositions numbered by numbered Gödel numbers are m-logically-valued (and may be unnumbered to binary propositions, “meaning” being incommensurate across structural orders of logical-value). All of this is mapped on n-dimensional manifolds under m-valued logical operators (as operator-time) and spread by autogenic brain discharge across the cortex. Number and Time by von Franz is the best account of this in the Jungian literature. She came right up to the edge of postulating “operator-time”. She cannot be faulted in this stopping at the edge, for she did not have the mathematical and physical theory background prerequisite to making such a large leap in comprehension. Hillman on pages 86 and 87 provides us with a clear example of this male “failure to understand”, along with illustration of the reason for that “failure”. Quoting page 86:
…Ares [the Greek god of war] was not Zeus's son. Hera [wife of Zeus] brought Ares out of herself alone in furious revenge against Zeus for his dallying escapades and prolific offspring. The war god [archetypal figure], germinated in her fury, emerges from her wrath.
And again from page 87:
If, however, we think about war as an emanation of a god, war as an archetypal impulse, then patriarchy does not originate war but serves war to give it form and bring it to order by means of hierarchical control, ritual ceremony, art, and law. Remember Foucault's idea that law is a continuation of war in another form. Rather than the origin of war, patriarchy is its necessary result, preventing Ares from blowing up the world and leaving a few poor remnants a life that is “nasty, brutish, and short.”
Here Hillman is using mythology as conveyed by a patriarchal society to justify patriarchy. Like Freud, Jung, Brown, and Marcuse, before him, he retains the notion of sublimation as the basis of civilization. Ares “emanates” war. The god Ares is treated as an archetype, not an archetypal figure. The “figure” signifies only; it cannot generate an “emanation”. This treatment, by clear implication, justifies war as a cosmological given to be tropologically modeled in the moral orders of human civilizations. Moral war justified! Hillman says that “…patriarchy is… necessary…”; otherwise, there will be the war of “all against all” Hobbes' Leviathan (and social contract theory) was designed to prevent. Foucault, as always, had it backwards: law is not a continuation of war; war is a continuation of law. As Derek says in MOON: Law is criminal because it prevents emergence (constellation) of the spontaneous self-organization studied in the quantum mechanics of “collective and cooperative phenomena” like superconductivity (of the pi-electron gas core of intraneuronal DNA: particularly of intraneuronal mitochondrial DNA, the female DNA in control of the genetic patrimony, and signified by the Shinto “rope”, a recognition the female artist Yagi Mariyo reached in the “sudden illumination” of her “rope shock”). Foucault's formulation is designed to protect the Logocentrism he purported to attack, protect it from implications of the 19th and 20th century discoveries in higher mathematics and physics which decisively undermine it. The cosmological metareferencing in forms of the life-world is to be tropologically modeled on binary logocentric hierarchy, not upon holographic m-logically-valued quantum-relativistic self-organization. The sublimation retained is a suppression of the multivalue through prescriptive enculturation and the associated glutamaturgic neuronal etching which blocks conscious access to m-logically-valued field-effect processing.
Hillman does seem a bit confused. On page 5 he tells us: “We humans are the species privileged in regard to understanding. Only we have the faculty and the scope for comprehending the planet's quandaries.” This is a statement of logocentric predisposition if there ever was one. What about the planet itself? Gaia. Hillman does, however, seem to get around to this in his discussion of how the blood of war returns to the land, and how the land, by virtue of this blood, carries war within itself and transmits it from human generation to human generation. Though this notion does not bespeak animistic identity transparency with the natural surround -- indeed, on page 101, he tells us that “the earth does not belong to us” -- he advises (p. 101) that “before 'going off' to war and sending in the Marines, we should consult the planet”. He even makes a “stab” at insight in considering Gadamer's hermeneutics. He quotes (p. 103) Gadamer: “Understanding involves a moment of 'loss of self'”; then goes on to discuss a term related to Hermes, “chthon (deep earth) as 'that which covers'”. But further confusion is revealed when he concludes (p. 103) that there should be “No attempt to get at the real cause, the true message by lifting the cover” for “The true nature of things loves to hide”. Though this “hiding” conforms to a fundamental notion of LATE Japanese aesthetics, not the aesthetics of “primitive” Shinto, I think Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess of the Japanese cosmogenesis myth, would not agree with inviolability of the cover. As Ilse says in MOON (Vol. 1, pp. 401-2):
In front of the eight-hundred gods and at the mouth of Amaterasu's dark cave, Ame-no-Uzume prances a licentious dance, pinching her nipples and dropping her skirt to expose her cunt for all the world to see. And behold! the Sun Goddess again shines her light on the world. Look, what is necessary is to pull down a very complex framework of coercion, a skirting framework that is extraordinarily destructive because it prevents the spontaneous evolution of adaptive social forms.
Hillman, on the other hand, cites (p. 61) the fact that the Celts and the Norse went into battle naked as an argument against the notion that normative nudity in everyday social life militates against massed warfare -- say, the nudity of the mixed public bath, which the Japanese had periodically during periods of relative social harmony. And which MacArthur outlawed! Probably his most important act of “nation building” -- given the psychological transformation it forced, and the concomitant change in the prevailing notion of personal space (minimum permissible distance, and the like). Check out how this thematically (Vico) plays in contemporary Japanese pornography. Hillman, however, goes on to discuss the adultery of Aphrodite (Goddess of Love) with Ares (God of War), which the male gods gathered around to watch, while the goddesses refused to avail themselves of the opportunity. And how do you think Hillman interpreted this refusal? You got it (p. 106):
So, when the goddesses wouldn't show up, won't even consider the possibility that there can be beauty coupled with the savagery of war, their denial repeats our shamefaced embarrassment over our fascination with war films, with weapons of mass destruction, with pictures of blasted bodies and bombs bursting in air.
But they didn't show up! Refused to participate in the voyeurism. Wouldn't watch the porno film. Wouldn't stoop that far to conquer. Me thinks Hillman's interpretation, his hermeneutics, smells of the psychological projection. Refusal to show up is not shamefaced embarrassment before the laughing and jeering male gods. So, what is the result of indulging in projection? One misses the fact that the “chthon (deep earth) as 'that which covers'” is the universal covering surface, the “ground” state, the base state of Tzog-chen covering the n-dimensional manifolds under m-valued logical operators spread by autogenic brain discharge across the cortex. “Understanding involves a moment of 'loss of self'”, in this case, loss of self as ego-sphere (Euclidian 3-sphere, not n-dimensional Riemann sphere), so the universal covering behind which m-logically valued processing is concealed can be removed. Would not the Sun Goddess, within whom all the elements are synthesized, long ago have mastered the basics of quantum chemistry?
In the end, Hillman starts to get the idea. He asks, several pages from termination of the book (p. 213), “Is civilization so dedicated to repression that it fears an outbreak of culture?” Great question. My answer is a resounding YES! And that is why, in MOON, Derek converges evermore resolutely on Musculpt. In my lexicon, sublimation is just another word for repression. The very origin of civilization according to the psychoanalytic model is sublimation (to me: repression of the multivalue, rather than suppression/transformation of instinct, for I do not buy into Robert Ardrey, selfish genes, social Darwinism, killer memes, and all the other ways of separating data from noise used to demonstrate that rise of the nation state based on force divided against itself was the inevitable path of an evolution in a linear-time which is multiply nested within orders of nonlinear “imaginary time”). Let in “imaginary time” and m-valued quantum-phase-digit logics and developmental evolutionary branching goes out the cosmic window along with very much else simplistic. Unfortunately, Hillman disparages such realities as (p. 108) “falling happily, religiously, for fanciful scientific descriptions of fuzzy sets, indeterminacy and uncertainty, black holes, warps and waves and chaos”. He arrives at his terminal question by a series of widely spaced observations, and, again unfortunately, does not have a fifth chapter to his book wherein this line of thought is explored. On page 164, he says: “But then, according to John Nef, the Protestant Reformation forced the aesthetic and the practical apart.” Good work -- work that psychologically fuses the handcrafter into the cosmic enfold -- dies with this separation. A cosmic exile has all sorts of problems with existential anxiety demanding a battlefield whereupon confirmations and denials can be exchanged -- and if enough people thus become aliens, mass warfare might be discovered as an existential solution. Hillman then discusses Nef's analysis yielding the observation that the Age of Enlightenment was a relatively peaceful period for Europe. This was the period when the arts, including art music, codified and explored in their own languages the Cartesian-Newtonian world construct. This codification had decisively broken down by the mid-19th century (largely under the pressure of discovery in many fields, and also due to exposure to The Great Books of the East). One-hundred-and-fifty years later, a replacement codification has not yet emerged. How can an institutional base be brought into correlation with the changing worldview when the arts do not perform the role of mediating between the two, as transpired, for instance, during the Age of Enlightenment? And if the arts failed to perform this role, why did such a thing occur? On page 170, Hillman suggests that “aesthetic culture can put some curbs on explosive violence”. He then explores the notion that war is all in action and concludes on page 212 regarding remedial therapy: “No, not the shield of aesthetic value, but the fury of aesthetic engagement.” Hillman gravitates on an antidote to war, but doesn't seriously begin to explore it. These are largely passing thoughts in midst of abounding literary effusions. For the medium, the message is missed.
Skimming through Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites (Henry Holt, 1997), I think, though the information provided will be of interest, her thesis will be unconvincing and a dead-end relative to discovery of an antidote to mass warfare. For all the faults in his treatment, Hillman, likely, is much more valuable. I will certainly read Ehrenreich closely, but her fundamental idea that contemporary warfare is a reenactment of early-human blood rites relative to predation by larger, more physically-dominant carnivores is to me implausible -- implausible because of what I know of the psychology of the battlefield. Reenactment there may be, but not the sort she imagines. And that reenactment is no part of the whys of mass warfare, though, recontextualized, it may be part of the antidote. Contemporary exemplars of the battlefield do not fear physical death; in the altered states of combat, physical death is not an issue, even as abeyance of the ego-function is a central factor. Hillman marshals the relevant quotes (p. 79): “death was beside the point”; “I knew I couldn't be killed”; “I didn't give a fuck anymore”; “They couldn't kill me. No matter what they'd fucking do.” These statements are not all at the same level of elaboration of the critical state: all but the first are far short of Sankaracarya's “High Indifference”. Before a person volunteers for Special Forces, even if straight off the block, he has already reached early stages of this state by back-reaction against the alienation, anomie, and existential inauthenticity of contemporary life under governance of the polis. No one volunteers for Special Forces because of actual patriotic sentiments. No one. He is after ichor, the transformative elixir: not blood red, but cornelian red-orange. Let's backup, however. Early man was not in a predation relationship with other carnivores: arguing that he was is back-mapping contemporary states of consciousness onto early man, an unwarranted exercise. Early man feared physical death no more than the lion -- because he did not exist in-so-far-as-distinct from nature anymore than does the lion: participation mystique, not psychoanalytically reduced, but in its full flower as animistic identity transparency, mediated by the coloristic deified “imaginary time” of dreamtime and song-line. His consciousness was not identified with his musculature, with his body, as is ours. The easiest place to experience inklings of this is in minor surgery under lidocaine HCl; in not so minor surgery under ketamine HCl (sans the hypnotic drug normally placed in the anesthetic cocktail); or under a saddle-block for surgery on a shattered-testicle wound; even, but to a lesser extent, under effects of IM Demerol HCl for acute lower-back incident. Your big toe is not your big toe: magnify that a thousand times over. One does not need to walk fire to get an inkling. The anesthetic separates the consciousness, not from body-knowing, but from identification with propriocepts: the body keeps on knowing without needing your direct participation. It should be noted here that in-the-body experience (being psychologically identified with the musculature of the body) became normative in the West by the time of the ancient Greeks, and prior to that time such experience was non-normative. This is very well demonstrated by Japanese scholar Shigehisa Kuriyama in his important book The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (Zone, 1999). See my discussion of this in “Roof-Brain Chatter”. Moreover, regarding blood sacrifice, one should be aware of content of the following, describing one means by which identity transparency was ritualistically fixed, which I wrote about a year ago as part of a piece on the use of high colonics fasting in detoxification therapy:
Eating Memories and Emotions
We have all heard the dictum, “You are what you eat”. More accurately, perhaps, what we eat plays a major role in determining what and who we are. No less accurate is the notion that what we think and feel about what we eat, and while we eat, plays a role in determining what and who we are.Memories have a molecular basis. Emotions have a molecular basis. When we eat food, we are eating molecules. In a very real sense, therefore, as strange as it may sound, when we eat, we are eating memories and emotions -- as well as what will become memories and emotions.
This, of course, has implications for how food should be grown; how it should be raised, transported, handled, prepared, and consumed; what should be eaten, what should not; what is good food, what is bad. Food is not a mere economic product; it is the very substance of life as we know it, life of the mind and spirit as well as of the body. Economics comes after life, not before.
Memory Transfers
The notion that “we are what we eat” is an archaic idea; it was probably an aspect of tribal cannibalism, which Scientific American, in a recent issue, has acknowledged is deeply rooted in our history. This was revealed by chemical analysis of the human fossil record. As fascinating, as disgusting, as shocking as this may be, it nonetheless is part of our human inheritance.Cannibalism is metaphorically behind the Christian Eucharist, the ritual of symbolically eating the blood and body of Christ during the Communion ceremony performed in Christian churches worldwide. By eating the blood and body of Christ we can become once again as little children, recover our youthfulness, and enter the Kingdom of Heaven. That is the symbolism; that is the metaphor. Rejuvenation is promised.
But this is not only an archaic idea; it is also a modern scientific idea. Beginning in the 1960s, investigations into learning and the way memories are stored in the body led to experiments which have clearly shown that memories can be transferred from one body to another in food. This has been demonstrated in worms, rats, fish, and other organisms.
The classic 1962 paper describing such experiments is that of James McConnell, entitled “Memory Transfer Through Cannibalism in Planaria”. Planaria are worms. Worms eating other worms; fish eating fish, rats eating rats. Birds eating worms, even.
Learned behaviors -- those behaviors, that is, involving performance of tasks acquired through training -- are transferred to the untrained organism by the act of eating the trained organism. The untrained worm eats the trained worm and acquires the training it never received. Before the eating, it could not perform the task; after the eating, it could. The same for rats and fish, birds and bees. Scientific confidence in the molecular basis of memory is rooted in such experiments.
Molecules of Memory, Molecules of Meaning
Peptides -- likely in most cases polypeptides, strings of joined peptides, commonly called proteins -- are the molecules of memory. This is the basic idea behind the “smart drugs” served in modish San Francisco juice bars. We all know that proteins are a category of food. According to government health departments, we must eat a certain amount of protein each day in order to sustain good health.The fact that memory has its basis in protein does not mean that a single memory, that, say, of your sister cutting the cake at her last birthday party, is stored in a single peptide or polypeptide molecule somewhere in your brain, or in the same hand as the hand your sister used to cut the cake. If memory of the cake evokes a momentary impulse of the hand to cut it, that does not necessarily mean that the memory trace, called an engram, is located in the hand.
Molecules have electromagnetic properties and those properties have properties, and so on. There are many complexities that contemporary scientists have not yet figured out. Holograms, those things through which three-dimensional images can be projected, and now appearing on credit cards and drivers' licenses as information storage devices, may be associated with peptides and polypeptides, and may be involved in memory storage in living organisms. Meaning, even -- the significance of a piece of information or a memory trace -- may be holographically stored by molecules. Indeed, a company called DigiBio (for digital biology) is now sending the electromagnetic essence of proteins over the internet as digital sound files. Take the drug without taking the drug! The sound signature of the drug has the same effect on the body as the physical substance of the drug, apparently without the side effects. This is the promise of digital pharmacology.
Memories and their meanings may be stored in association with molecules of the brain, of the whole body, or in the electromagnetic field of the body -- or even in some field this field is connected to. Scientists are increasingly coming to the conclusion that more than one of these forms of storage may simultaneously be the case, but this has not been definitively proven.
Pain is a function of level of ergotropic phasic activation. The dentist can approximate diminution of the same with heterohypnosis. Autogenic shift in the baseline for tonic activation. Combat is anesthetic not only by virtue of neurotransmitter flood; this flood works on the arousal-activation continuum according to the degree of engagement of ergotropic functions relative to those trophotropic. Long, intense, repetitive training -- being in THE Practice against the habituation response -- shifts the balance from ergotropic to trophotropic, modifying action of the anesthetic neurotransmitters relative to the tonic baseline: lowering thresholds, magnifying effects. RAS dampened in vivo under the quantal multivalue released by the Centrencephalic Saftey Discharge Mechanism at autogenic shift. There is a big difference between a shooter and THE Shooter. THE Shooter is trophotropic in high stress environments: his capacity for m-logically-valued processing has been resurrected to one degree or another by THE Practice (returning attention cathexses to automatized functions), the requisite glutamate-etched neuronal connections having been reestablished. He is a man who stays away from MSG, in one way or another. The anesthesia of PTSD is not a residual of commonplace neurogenic shock; it is drawdown on having once established habitus in the n-dimensional climbs spread by autogenic brain discharge across the cortex. Tunnel vision is the route of reentry into alienation, anomie, and inauthenticity. Been there; done that. The bicameral mind and its precursors did not experience linear-time and its concomitants in anything remotely like we -- inheritors of the breakdown of the bicameral mind -- do. The lower faculties we call higher -- spoken language as opposed to communication by generative empathic identity transparency; binary-logical thought as opposed to m-logically-valued thought in superposed synesthetic feeling-tones -- are the prerequisites of mass warfare. There was no figure-to-ground for early man, just as there is no such for the lion: only the ground. My body is the land, is the ancestors in the land: we are inseparable, indistinguishable: landscape ecology of the soul as collective occasion of experience. I cannot be killed because my I cannot live. Take my body if you can. THE Master Sniper is in generative empathy with his victim; he does not hate that victim, for he does not participate in petty concerns of the polis. He and his victim are one, just as the lion and the early man were one. The two (early man and lion) honor each other; they do not hate each other. THE Master Sniper is “elsewhere”, in complex n-dimensional spaces where different points are the same point, where any-one-thing is a nesting of nests, not a juxtaposition. I am in the lion; the lion is in me. We are “brothers”; there can be no hated enemies, for we and the world encompassing us are indistinguishable in the Turangalila (cosmic love play) Symphony played out by the song-lines enfolded in dreamtime as interior MUSCULPT. Where is the occasion for mass warfare in this? There was none, and it never happened. Food, as lion, was taken, just as the lion took food -- just as all God's creatures must take food, be the food on the animal level of consciousness, the plant level, the insect level, the mineral level. And food was honored in the collective aesthetic ritual which was everyday life -- not life of “me”, but of the ground, the ground-state in all its myriad miraculous transformations through “imaginary” dreamtime. Mass warfare has nothing to do with this. To the degree that warfare becomes technologically removed, THIS is removed. Mass warfare comes out of the “state” of the man who writes the job description (both meanings intended). Since the generative altered states of consciousness in question, sublime by all accounts and clear expressions of quantum-relativistic processes, are suppressed by the institutions imposed upon us -- organized religion of whatever stripe not the least among such institutions -- those processes find non-everyday regressed modes of simulacra by which to impress themselves upon their emergent properties: human brains. Clear implication as to antidote is recontextualization by finding everyday modes of expression for the involved quantum-relativistic processes. But organizational adaptation, unfortunately, has not been something the human species has excelled at for quite some time, certainly not on a creative level in recorded history. Some contextualization of these ruminations on mass warfare is provided during reflections on numerical modeling of tornado genesis.
I guess we can get into that sort of thing here, under the rubric of “strategic assessment”. I've never been one to limit the number of permitted scenarios. Over and over I've been asked: “What do you think is going to happen?” When I ask that question of myself, I have to qualify it with a second question: “To what level is the question addressed?” Your observation that I seem to be applying, likely misapplying, concepts associated with superstring theory to brain function focuses the discourse to a higher level. I will tell you what I think, rather than try to make an argument. I've never had the resources required, and no longer possess the mental wherewithal, prerequisite to attempted rigorous exploration. The days when that might have been possible have long since passed. Superstring theory is a collective psychological projection of faculties inherent to human brain, which are no longer available to consciousness. As with all psychological projections, this projection is a regressed form of the faculties placed in projection. This is the real reason why Jung and Pauli noted a correspondence between general relativity and Jung's account of the collective unconscious. Thirty years ago, when I asked Velikovsky whether he had knowledge of this correspondence, he thought I was asking him about written correspondence between Jung and Einstein! Whereas Velikovsky's granddaughter immediately understood the question and attempted to explain it to her grandfather. The likelihood that Einstein had the “seed idea” that spawned special relativity is very small. In some forgotten conversation the “seed idea” issued forth from Einstein's first wife, was taken over by Einstein, and in all psychological naiveté “developed” by him. Were one a believer in reincarnation, an idea tied to the notion of linear-time, one would have to suppose I was a female scientist in my last incarnation, one who just had to, in this incarnation, explore male dimensions of the man-woman level of the transference -- in order to fully understand what had transpired in her scientific cohort. Pauli brought forth the notion of “operator-time”, only to reject it as incompatible with the “standard interpretation”. The cosmos is far, far more complex than the practitioners of superstring theory have yet begun to imagine. Inability of those with lateral mental cleavage to penetrate the “measurement problem” is simply a marker of the larger problem. Even were the leap made to Hilbert space under m-valued logics, 3-fold imaginary operator-time, numbered Gödel numbers, and so on, this would remain the case. The number of the kinds of number there are in a world under m-valued logics is some order of infinity, and interfacing each such additional kind of number to principles generating the world construct fundamentally alters that construct. Gödel was hardly even the tip of the iceberg. Properties of the faculties of human brain function which are unconscious are projected onto the cosmos and apprehended there as if they constituted the physical reality we suppose to be the case. Then the principles of that “physical reality” are extracted and used to develop technologies that are applied to scale levels other than the cosmic, the critical scale level of application at the moment being that of planet Earth. Physics of plasma discharge, radar auroras, envelopment of the atmosphere in an Indra's net of microwave pulse-code beams, and the like. Cosmic base state, in a cosmos that is not selfsame under m-valued logics, is sufficiently complex as to function like a superconducting mirror: it reflects with verisimilitude anything projected upon it. Similar processes of psychological projection have been transpiring across the full spectrum of physical theory. This is an expression of a baseline in human hubris, particularly male human hubris: we humans never reduce the hubris below this baseline. Rather than intuitively grasping (knowledge through identity) the miraculous as miraculous, and reveling in the supreme joy such a grasp imparts, all the while using what knowledge we acquire to insure that we do not violate the miraculous as miraculous, we reduce the miraculous to equivalency to the small sector of our faculties allowed into normative consciousness by the forms of enculturation adopted in service to very mundane, mean, and pedestrian purposes. If this continues, as it likely will, the human species will not destroy the planet; the planet will destroy the human species. Such an act of destruction will involve transformations of planetary processes, but that is how a higher consciousness deals with a nested constituency that has outlived its welcome.
Thank you very much for the article on the Civil Air Transport pilots receiving the French award for flying re-supply missions to Dien Bien Phu (Robert Burns, “Their Valour Recognized -- Five Decades Later”, Bangkok Post, February 17, 2005). After all these years, I now probably know most of the real story. Pope flew 39 missions and there were 37 pilots. That's somewhere in the vicinity of 1443 missions. No wonder I remember wave after wave of C-119s taking off from Ashiya AFB, Japan. That part is, of course, not mentioned in the article, still not publicly known, and likely would be unwelcome news to many Japanese. Earliest instance of the U.S. using Japan as a supply depot for the Vietnam war. My father ran the supply end of the Dien Bien Phu re-supply effort. Perfect choice. He had flown one of the first planes into Tempelhof for the Berlin Airlift (no easy task, given the high buildings, I remember at some point being reminisced), and as far as I know flew a lot of flights throughout the year or so the airbridge was maintained. USAF pilots, not CAT pilots, ten years younger than he flew the planes from Ashiya AFB, Japan to Hanoi, where the insignia were changed to French. I always assumed that the planes were flown from Hanoi to Dien Bien Phu by French pilots, and that after the insignia were changed back to U.S. upon return to Hanoi the USAF pilots flew them back to Japan for another load of supplies. Stupid me! The USAF would allow French to fly American planes? I even remember the name of one of those USAF pilots (but can't remember names of people I met last week), as he “took me under his wing” and we were very close; he brought me gifts back from Hanoi and I helped him build an eight-foot long scale model of the then-experimental B-36, which crashed, and was totally destroyed, on its maiden flight over the base football field. This event was the subject of much ribbing at the O-club, I am sure. Not much ever came of this plane in its full size either. There is no way my father did not know that the pilots who took the C-119s on to Dien Bien Phu from Hanoi were CIA. So, in discussion 40 years after the event, and a few weeks before his death, he still mislead me about my childhood memories. This is instructive about accuracy of events as portrayed in history. So many factors remain concealed, there is just “no telling” what is a falsification and what is not. But I did not pursue this so doggedly for so many years simply because it became a “father-son thing”. That dimension was very much the least of it. Even at the time it was symbolic to me. It was part of my struggle for self-definition and, eventually, part of my attempts, assisted by Nha Trang's knowledge of Vietnamese folklore and rice ritual, to make sense of the animistic modes of awareness I was inducted into while living in that hamlet in Japan. I was frequently around pilot talk about the “Tonks” (short for Tonkinese, and a racial slur term somewhat like “gooks” which was at the time used for Koreans, with origins, I later learned, during the U.S. colonial occupation of the P.I.). From these overheard conversations, I knew that the Tonks were rice farmers like the Japanese were in the hamlet I was then living in. I was deeply into the life of that hamlet and aware that the re-supply effort was part of a war involving people living in a similar fashion. My father had made a point of taking me, and only me, along with him to view the bombing sites at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I also knew that he had grown up on a farm, and that all my relatives in Pennsylvania had come from farm families. Somehow, I reacted to all this as if I had been presented a confusing picture, or perhaps I had even then begun to recognize contradictory behaviors. And the issues kept recurring in new guises. I returned from Vietnam for my mother's funeral. When we left the cemetery, my father pulled me aside and asked me to accompany him to the farm he had grown up on. This was the only time I saw that farm, and only I was taken along. He had not been back there for over 30 years. As we walked the farm and met the Amish family then working it, he told me all sorts of details of the life lived there in his childhood, and many of these details had a distinctly animistic flavor. Running through my head listening to this were all sorts of speculations about the psychological consequences (relative to quality of perception, and so on) of living in contradictory behaviors. Later, when I returned to that little hamlet outside Ashiya 35 years after leaving there as a child, and again climbed the same slopes I earlier had to watch the C-119s take off, and the Japanese Self-Defense Forces fighter jet took off from the same flight line and flew low over my head, I had a full-blown “peak experience”. Not only did I suddenly understand the (karmic) patterns of my life in a way I never had before, but there was a flood of insight into the animistic modes of awareness I had experienced as a child in that hamlet, insight far surpassing anything I had until then attained. Somehow, understanding the mission of the C-119s had become a symbolic referent to the whole mass of psychological material I had spent decades trying to consciously integrate. Not only was I subsequently able to bring writing of MOON to an end, but the flood of insight brought an overwhelming sense of personal completion and I knew that anything else I might accomplish in my life would be incidental.
The article in February, 2005 Wired, entitled “The Painful Truth” by Steve Silberman, is so good I am going to break away from the program here to devote an hour to it. First of all, this article gives me a better feeling for realities of the war in Iraq than anything else I've read. Descriptions of Camp Anaconda read like a clone of the compound in which the Third Field Hospital was located in Cu Chi. I had not realized that they are receiving such regular rocket and mortar attacks that people have stopped reacting and sleep through them. As you know, it takes moving through a fair number of thresholds before that stage is reached. When I was in the Third Field, there were daily rocket attacks which occasionally hit the hospital and caused the bedridden, like myself, no end of trouble and associated pain of moving off of and back onto the beds. The new technology described for peripheral nerve blocks is certainly a wonderful innovation, but I would have to observe that the article is a bit ingenuous in that it conceals by omission that this technology could have been available decades ago. What is described is simply a continuous “saddle block”. In a saddle block, the lumbar plexus is dosed with anesthetic and the pelvic girdle and lower extremities are completely anesthetized for as long as the anesthetic is active. To achieve a continuous block, all they have done is replace the needle with a catheter and attach it to a pump and regulator. Targeting specific peripheral nerves is a mainly a matter of anatomy and situating the catheter. Why was this not done 20 years ago? Did they have to wait for microprocessors to create the regulator? I doubt it. Microprocessors are likely required only to make the device easily portable. The saddle block was widely used during the Vietnam war era and earlier. It's use (trusting memory) is described in the NATO Advanced Handbook of Emergency War Surgery printed during the late-1950's or very early-'60s (and used as a textbook for SF Medics beginning in the early to mid-1960s). Indeed, the description of Brian Wilhelm's treatment for what eventually became an amputation below the left knee was, in the early stages, very similar to the treatment I received for a testicle wound. I arrived at the Third Field less than 30 minutes after the dust-off Medevac was called. The hours of delay between wounding and calling the Medevac were unrelated to “the system” and simply the result of officer screw up (as was the occasion for the wounding). I had dozens of significant multiple fragment wounds (many of the myriad insignificant tiny fragments to this day work their way to the surface emerging in pus tracts like small encapsulated cysts), the worst of which was the testicle wound. I had been given morphine in the field about an hour after receiving the wounds. Times here are only guesses after the fact, as I was in no state to accurately estimate times. When I arrived at the field hospital, I was triaged and taken directly to the OR. They gave me a saddle block, not general anesthesia. I sat up and talked with the surgeon throughout the operation, discussing the procedures and options (given the OR experience I had had as an SF Medic trainee and my insistence that I do so: they initially resisted this, but eventually relented to get my cooperation; normally, under such a situation, they would go to a general, but decided against it, probably because following the saddle block, I was calm, coherent, asking focused questions, and making intelligent remarks). Surgery was without untoward incident. After surgery, however, my treatment differed from Wilhelm's. I received IV, then IM, Demerol HCl for about 2 weeks, rather than a continuous saddle block. Of course, I was not wounded anywhere near as seriously as Wilhelm, but had continuous saddle block been available, it probably would have been indicated for approximately a week, weaned off for a week with IM Demerol HCl. After the second week, I was evacuated to the hospital in Japan. There is no discussion of the history of saddle blocks offered in the article. Nor does the article mention that IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices), like that which caused Wilhelm's wound (and possibly my own, though the device used by the Viet Cong may have been a commercially manufactured mine mistakenly placed backwards at the roadside), do not produce high velocity missile wounds. The article mentions “compartment syndrome” (CS) from tissue compression caused by high velocity missiles (vibration of impact causing tissue necrosis [death] in areas adjacent to the wound area), which is highly relevant, but the discussion gives the impression that incidence of these is new to the Iraq war. This greatly stretches the truth. High velocity wounds were so commonplace during the Vietnam war that much of the surgical training given SF Medics was focused upon their consequences. This was the main “why” of Dog Lab: an anesthetized (general anesthesia) dog is shot in the thigh with a high velocity projectile, and the medic trainee is taught to debride the wound. Distinguishing between necrotic tissue killed by vibration of impact and undamaged tissue can only be learned in dealing with a real high velocity missile wound (the difference in appearance between the two types of tissue in the immediate post-wounding period is infinitesimal). If even the smallest piece of necrotic tissue is left unexcised by the surgeon, compartment syndrome will develop. CS becomes, essentially, gangrene. If caught early, a second surgery is required. If not caught early, a systemic infection is likely to develop, which could lead to death. SF Medics, by virtue of this Dog Lab training, were very accomplished at wound debridement, saving the lives of many of their wounded strikers who would otherwise have died in the South Vietnamese hospital system. Surgeons without such training can only learn this in the OR on human patients who have received high-velocity impact wounds (which few surgeons are exposed to in non-military medicine). One could easily regard CS as a result of surgical incompetence. A newly assigned surgeon learns by assisting an experienced one in the OR of a field hospital. The bacterial infections mentioned in the article are actually a separate issue. One reason why I quit working as a surgical tech at Camp Zama and chose to return to Vietnam was because I couldn't tolerate six hours a day in the OR handing someone else instruments to do things I had earlier done myself in the hospital at Ft. Dix. A surgical tech at the Zama Hospital noticed a note attached to my medical records by the surgeon at the Third Field explaining my background (probably written because of the unusual patient participation in the surgery) and this tech organized a transfer for me to the hospital staff during the period of the battle of Dac Tho when the hospital was flooded with patients and they had an acute shortage of qualified surgical personnel. I started working in the OR about two weeks after arriving at Zama and continued until a few days before leaving Japan for return to Vietnam. The Dac Tho patient flood was receding by the time I left. Other relevant aspects of wound trauma are not mentioned in the article. In the two weeks following surgery, I was packed in ice, because I developed intermittent delirium and a persistent fever so high they thought I might have falciparum malaria, a systemic infection, scrub typhus, early stages of blackwater fever, and so on. Surgical shock was not a likely explanation. Many tests; no diagnosis. Finally designated FOUO: Fever of Undetermined Origin. More “bizarre”, my white blood cell (WBC) count went through the roof (indicating massive immune system reaction or over-action) so decisively that, according to the usual conceptions, this could only have been produced by a massive systemic infection. Toward the end of the two-week period, the WBC count and fever spontaneously went back to normal in a several hour period. Only then could I be evacuated to Japan. The doctors had no idea how to explain either of these. I should note that the doctors were quite together, as they did not subject me to large doses of IV antibiotics in absence of a diagnosis. Icing was the main treatment employed. I spent the next ten years trying to understand these two phenomena, and the ideas about superconductant DNA model in relation to autogenic brain discharges, biological clocks, immune signifiers, and so on were largely the outcome of this search. These ideas did not come out of nowhere (or only out of mathematical modeling of double-helical flow patterns of air parcels in tornado genesis).
Consequences for the failed counterinsurgent do not accumulate along the way; they come in an avalanche at the end. This sets the world line of popular expectations such that the window of opportunity for alternatives is razor thin: there is no margin for error. But, generally, the fog of intellectual aporia is so dense, that window is non-viewable. Such matters, however, have only to do with details. The large patterns of what we regard as history are all DECOMPOSED from unconscious processes. Actions in relation to those processes are, by definition, not matters of public awareness; they are conducted internally.
Sorry, but I do not speak to role attributions, only the missing person; and nevermore do I pass again over fallow ground, except as does the falcon.
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