Existential Expansion

Styriaxis

(making your life more difficult to justify complaining about it)

 

 

I have been writing poems about made up words posted on the Internet from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig.  When my friend, Donn Trenton, heard this, he sent me the above word among others he has invented.  Serendipitously, the word ‘Styriaxis’ has provided the bit of grit needed for my oyster like mind to shape a pearl around – one whose nacreous layers of meaning have been searching many years for a nidus around which to condense and harden.   (Beautifully, I hope.)

Styriaxis is a word which describes a process of existential enlargement.  Styriaxis defines a method or an intellectual ‘machine’ for creating an expanding world of complaint.  It is an idea, embodied in a word, whose actions, be they beneficial or not, create a larger and larger playing field for a further action, which would be ‘to complain’.  There are many words like this, and not just words but aggregations of meaning which act the same, which have been fascinating me for some time.  They are thoughts which perform as generators of existence.

For example, take the county/folk singer John Denver.  He sings in a lovely, clear, tenor voice about love and other matters of a mostly lyrical nature in verses that are general positive and suffused with warm feeling for the modest life.  But, especially on his Christmas album, the ringing clarity of his voice has the chiming of a struck bell.  There is a profound hollowness, an expanding emptiness within each note.  This expanding emptiness is covered over by the warm and good wishes of his lyrics as best they are able.  Nevertheless, we hear and feel it.  The hollowness of his vocal clarity creates a demand for the warm embracing quality of his songs.  The two qualities thrive and expand each other.

And it would seem a lot of popular art has incorporated this self-expanding mechanism.  As another example, take a simple black box theater where the performance takes place under the klieg lights against a black backdrop.  Visually, we are seeing existence portrayed against nihility.  The nihility demands life.  And the life is dramatized by the nihility is skates across.  Put together, the two are an emotional machine for generating and capturing audience interest.  Their synergy is compelling.

Most of art criticism, to my mind, is of the surface exhibition and not enough of the nihilism which underscores it.  I would think that the artistic evocation of this nihilism would be as important a contributor to the total power of the aesthetic experience (and perhaps moreso) that the surface exhibition itself.  As examples of artists who might excel at the creation of the nihilism of the background and who are balanced otherwise, I would suggest the sculptor Giacometti and the playwright Beckett.  (Though here, I would have to say, my thinking remains ‘unfinished’.)

 

Which brings me to politics.  These ‘existential generators’ do not exist I think only in the art world.  I would hypothesize that they are everywhere, and perhaps more are being created as we speak.  In fact, perhaps these ‘existential generators’ are the precursors of our conscious existence.  Perhaps they create the stage on which we play out our lives.  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.  But they certainly exist in politics.

Reality is like a rock; it neither knows that we exist nor that it exists.  (Okay, this is my guess.)  A rock pretty well describes the nihilistic backdrop to all life as described by a materialist.  If we were to compare Socialism to a John Denver song, the materialism of their outlook would be the ringing silver bell of his voice.   Socialistic dogma would be the warm suffusing lyrical melody and lyrics.  “Isn’t it lovely to think so,” as one of Hemingway’s characters once said of another character’s hopes near the final page of “The Sun Also Rises” – a finally bleak, barren narrative.  The blindness of the lyrics to the realities of the sound leads to bad outcomes – which in turn accentuate the nihilism of the background demanding an accentuating of the foreground, and vice versa, ad nauseum.  The existential expansion occurs.  Socialism can generate its own popularity.  So can a Hemingway tale.  So can a John Denver song.  So can Donald Trump.

Contrast socialism with capitalism and free markets, whose goal is to fulfill the need.  By fulfilling needs, the free market decreases the volume of the nihilism or the vividness of reality, and in turn requires less of itself.  It is a machine which naturally disintegrates audience.  It is a machine which gradually begins to look unnecessary.  Humans are problem solving creatures.  Left without problems to solve they suffer cultural collapse.  Socialism creates problems and brings about cultural hardening.  Free enterprise eliminates problems and creates cultural softening.  This pretty much brings us to the political state we are in today.

The genius of Donald Trump’s nature is that it reverses the background and foreground.  His foreground is the authoritarian, ignorant, undisciplined, bellicose, impolitic and bullying personality which forms the background of the Socialist aesthetic.  His antics – narcissistic as a rock – absolutely rivet his opposition’s attention.  Meanwhile, his background employs the capitalistic/business principles he wishes to advance and in which his backers believe – and which actually does make things better.  Trump’s existential expansion wraps up Socialism’s  existential expansion in bravura antics and twitter feeds.  His paper wraps their rock – and gains him the election.  His capitalistic/business principles will cap his administration’s successes.  My take.

If you enjoyed this post, you may try more of Carl Nelson found here:  http://www.magicbeanbooks.co/home.html

Bourgeois Dignity by Deidre McCloskey

If you think of economics as a study of how we create wealth, economic theory was pretty much anybody’s guess until we finally made some.  For thousands of years the daily consumption of an individual remained pretty set at around $3 a day.

“Economic history has looked like an ice hockey stick lying on the ground.  It had a long, long horizontal handle at $3 a day extending through the two-hundred- thousand-year history of homo sapiens to 1800, with little bumps upward on the handle in ancient Rome and the early medieval Arab world and high medieval Europe, with regressions to $3 afterward – then a wholly unexpected blade, leading up in the last two out of the two thousand centuries, to $30 a day and in many places well beyond.”  (- McCloskey)   Modern day consumption in countries such as Japan or France hovers around a $100 a day, or in the United States of $120 a day, or in Norway of a $137.

Even at my age I can read a thick, thought provoking book.  What say?  And what I don’t remember, I can go back and check.  The benefit is that I have a bit of my own history and experience to check it against.  This is generally the reason a lot of wisdom is wasted on the youth, I’d guess.

Coincidentally, economics finds itself, at this juncture, in much of the same situation as me.  The world has recently suffered an experience with which to judge its former life against.  And, the metrics are available to measure the reality and amounts of said experience.

This “Great Fact of economic growth discovered by historians and economists in the 1950s and elaborated since then,” has changed everything.   The experience, which Deidre’s book circles, is of an amazing burgeoning of world wealth beginning first in Holland, and then Britain in the 1840s, and then experienced successively by other countries.  “The Big Economic Story of our own times is (when) the Chinese in 1978 and then the Indians in 1991” hopped onto the hockey stick of growth also.

McCloskey has it that modern economics has tended to view the Great Fact of our recent hockey stick growth in narrow materialistic terms because ‘the light is better there’.  McCloskey’s retort would be, ‘but that’s not where the money was made…’   Then he assiduously dismantles all of the classical economic explanations, using material statistics and facts, many previously unavailable to earlier economic theoreticians.

Classical economists like their prudent investors with their rational behavior, but this in not where the money is presently, nor was, at one time, made, McCloskey states.  Rational behavior does not create much wealth.  The historical record demonstrates that rational maximizing behavior generates rather paltry or even unremarkable growth.  One by one, McCloskey eliminates each of the classical economic explanations for the Great Fact – and finds each sorely lacking.  In doing so, he explodes some common beliefs.

For example, wealth is not created by robbing the poor – because they have none.  Certainly some miscreants benefit, but little wealth is obtained.

Slavery was of very little economic benefit to anyone in the supply chain, save the initial en-slavers, who were generally other tribesmen.  The South’s economy would have generated wealth without slavery nearly as it had with.

Trade generates little wealth.  It merely shuffles it around.

The mercantile system likewise generated little increased wealth.  (Though people obviously thought it did!)  While the great business houses (such as the East India Company) might have made some return, the nation’s citizens generally did not share – and more likely suffered  from the increased taxation wrought by the duties of imperialism.  For example, losing the American colonies was of an economic relief to the British.

Even education and scientific research are found lacking as explanations of the Great Fact.  Practical innovative insights generally preceded scientific explanation.  And education can often be counterproductive.  As McCloskey displays, if the wrong lessons are taught and the wrong social structures solidified, an economy can easily stagnate.

McCloskey assiduously eliminates explanation after explanation in order to surround and describe a more humanistic explanation for the Great Fact which is statistically harder to measure.  McCloskey believes that the Great Fact is explained by innovation, which alone has the power to create great wealth.  And he explains the origins and growth of innovation by way of the Bourgeois Revaluation: a cultural transformation, in which added to the value of prudence in handling ones finances, the bourgeois also found the liberty to innovate and cultural dignity for doing so.  These two principles, in McCloskey’s telling, unleashed a burgeoning economy through the creation of wealth through innovation – doing it better and easier.

Virtue has been often held up to be its own reward.  So it can be calming and reassuring to read a book in which Virtue makes us a lot of money, too -especially when the thinking seems to be wide-ranging and credible.  You might enjoy reading this one – a little bit nightly, taken like a pill following the evening news – with a little tea and chocolate, your dog and cat.

If you enjoyed this post, you may try more of Carl Nelson found here:  http://www.magicbeanbooks.co/home.html

Why Political Systems Endure to Squabble Interminably

(Spoiler:  It’s the Libertarians)

Perhaps the reason various political systems endure and are argued is that they all have some current application.  For example, monarchy is the ruling system of the family:  King father, Queen mother, the aunts and uncles of Nobility, and finally the lowly Citizen-children.  All are granted their seniority with due rewards and obligations in the hierarchy.  Women especially have a warm spot for the royal touch of the hereditary monarchies, such as the  Camelot Kennedys and Princess Diana.

Communism, which would seem worldwide to be the adversary of free enterprise, capitalism, business and ‘the American Way’ – is actually the functioning paradigm of most business. At work, the resources of the company are generally there for the use of all workers – workers whose value and efforts at building the company are judged and used and disposed of in kind.  One’s attitude is continually monitored with periodic supervisory ‘evaluations’ of performance being common.  You are told which work you will perform, where it will be done, and who you are to report to.  You have a ‘job description’, which describes the type of corporate citizen you are.  Freedom of speech is curtailed.  Dress codes prevail.  Outside activity can be proscribed.  The strictures are manifold.

Socialism is most clearly practiced in the public schools, where labor and money are dispensed – on the basis of need –  to children who are yet unable to contribute to the economy.

Fascism is the essence of professional team sports and corporations, where the workers are employed, fired and transferred on the basis of enhancing the organizations’ success.  Titles, job descriptions, and status designations predominate and rule activity.

But perhaps it is the in the military where the most effective mechanisms of Fascism function.  The struggle of veterans to re-enter a civilian society which after their service seems lacking in purpose and commitment, speaks to the great power of the fascist mental engine in creating an unbreakable bond of loyalty between brothers united in a single focused challenge rimmed with excitement and danger.   It may have been Susan Sontag who said, “The problem with fascism is that it’s too exciting, and the problem with socialism is that it’s too boring.”

Theocracy is the hierarchy of organized religion – and even disorganized religions – which place God at the top.

Democracy is the representation and working mix of this hodgepodge of political loyalties, which, to function, must respect each systems natural dominion.

But as the partisans of each system expand, they seek  to re-create the government in their image.  History abounds with examples of failed countries where each of these systems have transgressed their natural bounds and have obtained the coercive powers of government.

 The American Constitution, by seeking to limit the coercive power of government over its citizens, ironically insures the liberty of its citizens to chose their preferred ‘political’ lifestyle.

Academics and the government employed edge towards Socialism.  Families prefer the Monarchy style.  Corporate and military lean towards the Fascist.  And the Church of course is Theist.    It is the Libertarians, whose vision of government most resembles that of a Constitutional Caretaker, who labor daily to keep the warring political creeds contained within their dominions and voluntary; that is, removed from the levers of power. 

And it’s a thankless task.  Libertarians rarely generate enthusiasm.  And they rarely win elections.  But it’s the wise ruler and citizen who heed their counsel.

If you would like to read more of Carl Nelson’s writing, please visit: http://www.magicbeanbooks.co/home.html

My High School Address As a Returning Famous Alumni

       I’ve fantasized ever since high school about returning as a famous and/or accomplished alumni and delivering an address to the assembled senior class.  I doubt that I am alone in this dream.  Also I am not alone, I believe, in not being asked to speak.  But, being in the arts, I am well used to this.   And perhaps we have trained to handle this better than many in the other professions.  Artists, especially I would think poets, know that life burgeons without audience, and for example a fish or a flower (and maybe even a poet) actually does better without us around.  And poets have continued to thrive like weeds, and to produce poems like dandelion seeds, even in those arid locales empty of audience.  In short, I am warning you that I plan to deliver this high school address nevertheless.  Because I feel I have something to say, but more importantly, because I want to.  Poets know that what you want is surely the most compelling reason for anything. More important than sex, fame or money – or perhaps one in the same.   it’s like breath.

Dear Seniors:

I am limiting my remarks to two nuggets of advice I would offer the young person heading out into the world.  This first nugget is not something I came up with myself.  Most of the best advice you won’t come up with yourself, just like the best words or phrases, or the tools you loan to a friend.  You loan them because you’ve found them to be handy.  So it is with this first bit of advice on contentment:  Don’t try to get more out of something than there is in it.

 I have seen this bit of advice violated all of the time and have even do so on many occasions myself.  Right off the top of my head, the first subject under this heading to discuss would be marriage.  But since you’re graduating seniors I will start with something I had to learn which is much closer to home: your parents.  Stories of parents who pressure their children to either be like them, or to achieve better than them, or to find some destiny denied to them, or simply to continue ‘being’ them after the parents own best years pass are legion.  And almost as legion are stories of parents, especially fathers, who do all they can to prevent their offspring from usurping their glory, or even imagined glory.  You all must know what I am speaking of.  You know it’s wrong.  They may or may not know.  But what it amounts to is trying to get more out of their children than is offered.  What hadn’t occurred to me for many years was that the maxim turns counterclockwise also.  Children often stubbornly demand that their parents offer more than is available: more love, more support, more understanding, more assistance, even more understanding, more knowledge or experience, or even more support.  I wanted mine to be an artist – or at least to value art.  The list is longer than the squalling.   Right away, whether you are the parent or the child in this drama, you can halve your frustration immediately by simply giving up.  Or as one of Arthur Miller’s characters says in a play, “The secret to wisdom is to stop.  Whatever you are doing, stop it.”

Marriages are ruined, tarnished, and impoverished all of the time by a failure also to acknowledge this maxim.  Your partner cannot make you successful.  They cannot keep you from failure, work, or illness, or any of “the thousand Natural shocks. That Flesh is heir to…,” or supply you with discipline or character.”  Don’t expect it.  Don’t demand it.  Things will go better.

My second nugget of observation would be that humans are natural problem solvers, and that this world is rife with problems.  We’re a natural fit.  So when you go out into the world wondering what you should do, what you should become – ask yourself what problems there are which you enjoy working on?  it’s said that the best boss is the one who wants to hear your problems.  The best physician wants to hear what’s wrong.  The best actor asks, “What causes this character to move?”  The best inventor wonders how we could do this easier?  What is it you like to fix?

No one hires someone to enjoy the salary, or the perks, or the status or the adulation.  Everyone is paid to solve a problem.  What problems do you like to solve?

Start solving them.  You are writing your ticket.

That’s it.  That’s all.

Thank you for offering me this opportunity.

1967 Alumni, Carl Nelson

If you would like see published work by Carl Nelson, please visit:  http://www.magicbeanbooks.co/home.html

The Two Mathematicians

Global Warming Alarmists, with their over-riding  faith in the ‘accepted’ scientific consensus, remind me of the two mathematicians who proved that bumblebees can’t fly.  (The implications of which would be alarming, also.)

When it was pointed out to them that bumblebees do fly, they said, “Oh!  So you consider yourself a mathematician?”  They then produced a stack of cardboard boxes filled with papers crammed with mathematical formula, equations, arrows, diagrams and calculations.  “Perhaps you would show us then, please, just where our mistake is?”

…..

“You can’t, can you?”  They replied smugly.

If you would like to read more work by Carl Nelson, please visit: http://www.magicbeanbooks.co/home.html

Newspeak and Masculine Vigor

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/12/26/at-the-university-of-oregon-no-more-free-speech-for-professors-on-subjects-such-as-race-religion-sexual-orientation/?utm_term=.fdb7894617b7

 

The above opinion in the Washington Post by Eugene Volokh concerns free speech issues at the University of Oregon.  Apparently the University of Oregon administration has declared that students or staff may be institutionally disciplined not only for what they say, but that they may also be disciplined if enough others object to what they have said.  “The harassment policy, the university report notes, bans conduct that creates a “hostile environment” based on “age, race, color, ancestry, national or ethnic origin, religion, service in the uniformed services (as defined in state and federal law), veteran status, sex, sexual orientation, marital or family status, pregnancy, pregnancy-related conditions, physical or mental disability, gender, perceived gender, gender identity, genetic information or the use of leave protected by state or federal law.”

That’s quite a mouthful to worry about as you chirp, “Good morning,” to your students or colleges and consider the risk of follow up.  It would seem that teaching some subjects under this ban would be very difficult – most likely impossible to do credibly – and make tricky teaching of many others while staying out of the cross hairs.

Which may be the point.   This is taken from the New Criterion,  January 2017.  It concerns “Newspeak” as invented by George Orwell in his prescient book, 1984, about evolving totalitarianism:

 

By limiting what may be said, the University – much like the Inner Party of 1984 – is well on its way to making the construction of conflicting arguments impossible, and eventually, as per the recipe for Newspeak, recounted in 1984, finally impossible to consider or even to imagine.

You needn’t wander very far from home to see the mechanisms of Newspeak operating around us now.  Conservatives encounter this on a daily basis when trying to discuss political matters with Progressives.  Progressives literally cannot understand us.  Progressives cannot understand why Trump won.   Instead they shout slurs as if to ward off the Devil.  They cannot understand why we are not petrified by Global Warming.  They cannot understand why we would not want to welcome thousands of Muslim immigrants.  They cannot understand that illegal immigration is illegal.  They don’t seem to understand the word “illegal”. There are many sides to other issues which the Progressive Newspeak simply will not allow Progressives to imagine or to understand.  Like scared Shamans, all is left in the Progressive arsenal are explanatory pejoratives, the ‘usual suspects’ of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny,  islamophobia, flat earthers,  the scientifically illiterate, poorly read, intellectually challenged, … idiots, morons, dumb, and then the reactionaries, assholes, mean-spirited, selfish, greedy, blind, pigs…   It goes on and on.  One would have to be quite gifted to be all of those things at once.  And on this, we seem to agree.  This, they explain, is why we win.

It is widely held by critics of public speaking that an audience is often much more influenced by the appearance and performance of the speaker than by the value of what is said.   I would be hard put to find anyone of whom this is more true than Donald Trump.  Not only is much of what he says incorrect, but it can change dramatically the next day, the next hour, or even within the next sentence.  And if you catch him in a deception he will either deny it or disparage you, or tell you that he is very very smart (and yourself, well, not so much).  You have no idea how smart!  One would think that these are all poor character traits to have in a Presidential Candidate.

Unless, that is, you would want someone who can tear through the turgid net of Progressive cant in which most Conservative speakers allow themselves to be constricted.  Trump tears through Progressive verbal strictures as if tender paper nets constructed in safe areas by cloistered ‘snowflakes’.

What does it matter, specifically, what he says?  That could change.  Generally, though, we get him.  And the payoff is immediate.  He talks back to Progressive power.  A fresh breeze blows through.  Clear thinking is allowed.  Thoughts can be thought.  Arguments can be had.  Common sense decisions can be made.  And there doesn’t seem to be anything the Progressives can do about it.  In fact, Donald has them wringing their hands and shedding tears.

When Taiwan calls, Trump picks up the phone, because it would be rude not to.   He chats.

“Heresy!”  says the accepted thinking of the Intelligensia.

“Jeeze, that feels good,” says his electorate.

 

If you enjoyed this essay, consider reading more of Carl Nelson at:  http://www.magicbeanbooks.co/essays.html

The Joys of a Poet

(And His Arrival at this Most Minuscule of Positions)

I cross the Ohio everyday.

Of the many experiences I remember of my theater years, the most compelling occurred on stage.  They were small moments, mini-scenes, in which the characters seemed so autonomous that the actors no longer needed to please the audience.  They were little sections of life that didn’t need to sell their plight to the audience; didn’t need the audience’s approval.  No great injustice needed be fought.  Rather, the tables were turned and it was the audience which could either watch or not.

These scenes from my work which have so stuck with me were quiet areas in the midst of the plays’ turbulences where this balance had been achieved… if only to be enjoyed for a short time, the world and theater being what they are.  Looking back, it’s occurred to me that the theater was not my calling as it is not rising conflict which energizes me but balance.  I love playfulness.

Amount and quality of audience are the two measures of a playwright.  If you cannot attract an audience and/or critical stalwarts, then you are not a playwright.  Those are the realities.  But like most practitioners I fudged.  I could attract a smidgeon of an audience, and some of them liked it – so I rationalized and called myself a playwright.  For I did write several plays, and they were produced, and, as unsuccessful people are apt to say, (with each career change), “I learned a lot!”

I would guess one of the reasons artists would yearn for great success – aside from the money and fame and beautiful lovers – is that it gives them a forceful argument when dealing with the complaints of people they have known privately.   For a very successful playwright, the easy reply is that, “Well, you are just a small minority of the many, many who loved it.”  A small time playwright cannot use this defense.  The troublesome person lives right next door.  The hope for audience is partly a defense mechanism.

Also a large audience will grant a artist the opportunity to command better and better opportunities.  For a playwright this would mean access to the best actors, directors, set designers, venues and… even audience.  But it also means restrictions.  The more money, the more pressures to reduce risk and to frequent travelled ground.  The better and more powerful your collaborators, the better they are at stealing the audience for themselves.  A popular actor might want the scene re-written to better showcase them.  A powerful director might insist upon their vision.  A powerful financial source might prefer the politics slanted a bit differently – or removed.  And the venue has a very worried view of what their regulars will endure.  With the acquisition of a large audience, there is always the risk of losing it.  The second guessing becomes as bothersome as pushing a huge rig down the road, squinting ahead, all the while glancing in the mirror at a wandering trailer.

I’d guess the first audience for most of us would be our parents.  And perhaps many of us found theirs as frustrating as I found mine.  Mom and dad would pay attention, but only in their terms; not unlike strangers.  This was a bone of contention between us for many years.  Finally, I gave up.  I no longer shared how I felt or my hopes, and oddly enough, our relationship improved markedly.  Mom and dad were intelligent, generous, caring people once I got over the fact that they didn’t want to know me very well.

Segue to the audience…

Since that time, I have employed this tactic often.  The solution to many an insoluble problem is to ignore it; proceed as if the world were created without that problem.   If acquiring audience seemed an insoluble problem for me, why not eliminate the audience?  For all these reasons – and the fact that I’d pretty much played out my hand as a playwright – poetry looked pretty good to me.

So after I had moved from Seattle to this Appalachian area, I looked around and found a poetry group which looked compatible.  They were close by, met frequently, weren’t attached to any college or university, and most importantly had sympathy for the spirits – albeit pagan, (in their case).  When I first read my poems to the group for their reaction, one of the first individuals to respond asked skeptically:  “Who do you imagine your audience to be?”

They all looked to me.

“I didn’t think poetry had an audience!” I responded.

“You may leave now,” the next laughed.

 

In truth, I had had my fill of trying to acquire and please an audience.  A writer gets tired of playing the whiskey drummer.  Some of my misgivings are revealed in a previous piece I’ve written.

Poets have little audience, generally make no money, and, unless they misbehave, command little attention.  We wander about in the artistic world a little like derelicts or the homeless.  All of which allows us great freedom.  And we catch our audience as we can… perhaps spouting off in a bar – or wherever we find ourselves for that matter, like the local hardware.  People don’t believe they are listening to poetry in so much as they believe they are arguing with a drunk or indulging an eccentric – which is a time honored practice in small, out of the way spots like here in Appalachia – or hope of hope, enjoying a laugh with a clever fellow!

Poets talk among themselves swapping words and a cleverly turned phrase in a verbal one-ups-man-ship.  And now and then when the urge to flock comes upon the poet community, they hold readings.  The grudges are dropped, the qualms muffled and a general comity of fellow feeling along the lines of “We are all in this together” and “I will listen to you if you will listen to me,” contains the aggregate of assembled oddballs.  Aside from this, poets send out their little missives to journals and odd sorts of publications as if spreading sparks in hopes of starting a fire.  This is the off-the-main-road-poet’s life, aesthetic nobodies chipping flints over damp wood and hoping for a conflagration.

As far as rewards, there is the quiet joy – something like that of a stamp collector – of having trapped a bit of life in verbal amber.  I’m reminded of the New Yorker joke showing the painter in his studio sitting to admire his painting on a Friday’s night with a coke and a theater pail heaped with popcorn.  Only the artist fully grasps the ins and outs and the subtleties of life captured in a well done work.  His lack of audience allows him unfettered freedom.  And his inability to market successfully frees up his schedule.  Find a bit of work or arrangement to pay the rent, add a few understanding spirits to voice admiration from time to time, and you have a satisfied fellow.  Or, at least someone satisfied enough to continue working…

A good poem doesn’t need an audience to be alive.  It’s alive all by itself.  It’s the audience which needs the poem to feel alive.  And that is because a good poem has balance.  And we rest in its achievement.  Not everybody of course, but there are people out there who delight in a little heaven here on earth.

So, to the number of audience an artist needs?  Just enough to keep him working, I’d say, and find him a little rent.

No more than fifty to a room at any time.  Anymore and it’s just the sound of hands clapping from somewhere out beyond the circle of light; the circle of trust…  but quixotically, always with the possibility of many more, if only to make the writing of the poem like purchasing a lottery ticket.  We keep talking and writing, hoping for that conflagration.

If you would like to read more of Carl Nelson, visit:  http://www.magicbeanbooks.co/home.html

My Son Doesn’t Like to Read

My Son Doesn’t Like to Read

 My son doesn’t like to read.  Reading for enjoyment is a mystery to him.  Actually, sitting still for enjoyment is a mystery to him.  About the only thing he will sit still to watch are sports on TV and social media videos.

He is not ADHD.  He can spend large amounts of time working at the computer on photographs and design problems, and he can concentrate and finish his homework.  He is quite organized.  But the only times he will read is when he needs information.  And if he can obtain that information by listening, or asking a teacher or watching a YouTube video, he would prefer it.  He does not read to understand.  Gaining a deeper understanding of the life around him through reading would seem to be an oxymoron to him.  What he most prefers is being out doing activities with friends.

I’m not much worried about my son’s prospects in life.  He already runs his own business.  He makes money.  He is very active socially.  He’s well liked and well behaved.  Life doesn’t demand that he read that well.  His biggest problem is that school demands he reads that well.  And colleges demand that he read that well.

And speaking as someone who enjoys reading and does quite a lot of it, I wonder if society is best served by the emphasis our educational institutions place on reading.  I realize this is heresy and in a large part probably wrong-headed.  But, as I’ve aged and butted my head up against the world, it has occurred to me that many of the people I know, who have done quite well in life, do not like to read.  And conversely, many of the people I know, who like to read, have not done as well as might be supposed, given their abilities.

I was first struck by this while trying to create a producer for my play.  The fellow was a quite successful graduate from Stanford.  He was somewhat intrigued by the idea of play production.  But he admitted to me candidly that he didn’t like to read, and couldn’t imagine having to make it through “all those scripts”.  Another fellow I met was admitted to Stanford almost entirely on his test scores – not his high school attainments, as I think he might have dropped out.  But he had spent most of his teen years assiduously reading his way through the public library, and so seemed to have wowed the admissions people.   He, however, did quite modestly in life, and much less than I might have expected.  Then, there are others I have run across.  For example, a quite successful CFO, a sought after mechanic who had never learned to read, and the Lord knows how many quite successful salespeople.  In fact, the more successful the salesperson, the less it seemed they enjoyed reading.  It wasn’t the product understanding so much as the numbers of people you met.

On the other hand, I like to read, and find myself among many friends and acquaintances who enjoy reading also, many with advanced degrees.  But, many of these well-read friends have only had modest success in life, if that.  I’ve many well-read friends who have lived on the fringes of poverty most their lives.  And of the ones who have done better, most have achieved some success within a profession.  But, of those within a profession, it still seems that those who prefer to read have still not done as well as those who don’t, or at least as well as their gifts would have appeared to take them.  Of the doctors I know, the most successful does not particular enjoy reading.

So why doesn’t reading help us that much?  This is the question which has occurred to me – especially since I like to read.

The most obvious reason I suppose is that reading is like golf; it takes a lot of time and takes us away from the business at hand, which is applying ourselves to life.  “Always with your nose in a book,” as they say.

There are probably a multitude of reasons, actually.  But the one most dire, that has occurred to me, is that the pursuit of reading is fueled by the belief that a better understanding of the world will naturally make us more successful.  And I wonder if this is necessarily true.  What age has taught me is as Shakespeare noted:  “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  This idea of getting a step up on life through greater understanding seems to be of limited use!  Life, as I’ve come to know it, seems to be like the weather or the stock market and confound even the most learned.  And those who do best are those who place their bets and get into the game – just as those who do best at investing are those who start.  It’s simple enough, really.

A more troubling aspect is that the notion that we can understand life more successfully through reading – gets extended by the ego of the intellectual among us into the belief than they can fully understand life, at least to the extent that they owe it to the general betterment to legislate how the rest of the less acquainted with the ‘facts’ should live.  Our educational institutions would seem to inculcate this view, if only implicitly.  At one point this was the view of the educated nobility.  Presently, it seems to be the view of everyone.

To read more of Carl Nelson, visit: http://www.magicbeanbooks.co/essays.html

 

Pulling People From Their Cars

My barber, who is working with me on our latest strategy to rule my aging hair, was worried following Trumps victory.   “They pulled a fellow from his car and beat him up just because he said he’d voted for Trump!  What kind of people do that?”

I get my hair cut in this little shop about a block from home, which takes up the street side of a small frame building, about the size of a one car frame garage.  It used to be a bank, then a doctor’s office back in the60s.  The barber, who is a skinny woman with ratted hair was about as frizzed as her do.  “Don’t worry,” I reassured her.  “We are two hundred miles of thick forest from people like that.”

 

I used to live in the Seattle area.  And whereas I didn’t live around people who did things like that, I did live and work around a majority of apologists for people who did things like that.  In Seattle, they were against Hate

Well, out here, embedded with the Trumps, we are not so much… against hate.  We  just know it’s a nasty emotion and best let out only under extreme circumstances.

 

The problem probably is, that in Seattle, nice a place as it was (and still is, I suppose), having failed to do enough hating in timely fashion – there is just an enormous amount of it piling up.  So that currently, there is racism to hate, Islamophobes to hate, hate-filled bigots to hate, privileged people to hate (but who should actually be hating themselves – if they would just do their share), misogynists and homophobes and transexualophobes and corporate shills, and tools, and then self-interested people in general, plus all those people who don’t care about the planet.  I really can’t recite the whole list here.  Suffice to say, the people who seem to need hating comprise, what I would guess from polls to be, about half the United States!

But it wasn’t just what crawled across the evening news which made living in Seattle a trial over time.  They didn’t just stop at the normal things that need hating from time to time.  Nearly everything a person did or said made for politics in the big city.  And if you found yourself ‘on the wrong side of history’, the crosshairs moved to you, and you needed hating also.

What kind of car did you drive?  Is it environmentally correct.  What kind of house do you live in? (Too large?  Too many windows?   Energy wasting?  Long commute?  Far from public transportation?  Near locally grown food source?  Diverse community?  Can you have chickens?  Poorly situated to capture passive solar?  Can you recycle, mulch, compost, on and on…)  What kind of work do you do?  (Are you ‘giving back’ by working for a non-profit, or a charity in order to make the world a better place… or are you in this life just for yourself?)  Are you raising more children that the planet can support?    Are you raising your children to be free of racial prejudice, sexual assumptions, the accepted mental shibboleths such as American Exceptionalism?  Are you allowing your children to go about unsupervised and possible at danger?  Are you teaching them to drink responsibly?  Are you fat and undisciplined?  Are your children fat?  Are any of your friends overweight?  What are they doing about it?   Does your cooking display a sound knowledge of the world’s diverse cultures?  Have you ever eaten fast food, and if you ever enjoyed it, what is wrong with you?  Do you have any idea what is in a hot dog?  (Don’t even get them started on the high fructose corn syrups which make up the catsup you dribble across it, or the white bread bun completely devoid of nutritional content altogether – even when ‘enriched’.)

Most of these things, by themselves, are reasonable concerns.  So are the Ten Commandments.  But at least in the Bible, there were only ten.  (Which, with the New Covenant, became pared down to just two.)  In Seattle the extent of the new commandments knows no limit.  Virtually everything a person does is commented dissected and commented upon in the public sphere.  Picture a person rising, beginning the day, working, spending time with the family then eating and sleeping – and then picture the ongoing political commentary which accompanies his/her every minute describing how each action affects the moral compass of the community as a whole.  It’s no joke that when the most progressive of this caball extend the moral commentary to its rightful conclusion – their conclusion is that humans are a moral blight upon the earth and need exterminating.  Conservatives would probably agree that we are all born into sin.  But the Progressive leading edge think that as a species, we should be eradicated like a cockroach.

And this is where the Seattle culture as a whole has fallen short.  And you have to wonder if they are really on the right side of history, as they insist upon staying alive – an obviously bigoted stance.  Their rational, I’d suppose, is that they need to live in order to cull the population of the unenlightened others.  Then they’ll kill themselves.  They promise.

 

To a God fearing culture, it’s old news that we are born into sin.  No surprise there.  Nevertheless, God appears to want us here and expects us to do our best.

So in a God fearing culture such as it is here, embedded with the Trumps, we accept our shortcomings.  Sundays we go to church.  Other days we work to support ourselves.  And otherwise we amuse ourselves as we see fit.  We race gas-guzzling cars.  We hunt.  We shoot guns.  We run around the woods.  We fish.  We eat squirrel, deer, catfish…  We play football.  We love sports.  We fight the elements.  We drive whatever damn vehicle we want.  We dress as we want.  We live in whatever kind of house we want.  We drive as far as we want.  We cloth ourselves as we want.  And we say what we want.  The best estimate we can have of our neighbors is that they are “decent people”.  But, as a whole, we’re all sinners.  I’m afraid that’s the generally accepted community condition.

What is decent?   Well, it has very little to do with either how they’ve voted, the car they drive, whether they’ve worried about sustainable agriculture or global warming, whether or not they’ve ever tried humus and pita bread, whether their home is built to capture passive solar, whether they support LQBJTUVWXYZ rights, more whether they work- than for whom they work, and not even much about whether they attend church regularly, or are overweight.  You live around someone.  You get to know them.  And you know.  …you just know, more or less.

And so far this decency has kept us from pulling people from their cars and beating them for voting incorrectly.  It’s something to consider.

For books by Carl Nelson go to:  http://www.magicbeanbooks.co/home.html

Red or Blue?

This November 8^th, Are You Going to Take the Red Pill or the Blue One?

 

It would seem Hillary supporters and Democrats, in general, view themselves as the more intelligent, educated and successful portion of the citizenry, burdened with many poor relations.  They would view themselves as the more urbane, cultured, sophisticated and nuanced in both their understanding of current events and the world also.  Add to this that they believe in rational discussion of the facts and disdain the irrational.  You needn’t believe me!  They will tell you this.  As will the media… ad nauseum.    They also glow with rectitude, possibly because they eat ‘smart’ and exercise.

Hillary Clinton’s supporters currently say that the scandal surrounding Hillary’s e mails amounts to nothing.  There are lots of people in like positions of power who have private servers, they say.  The Clinton Foundation, likewise they say, should be commended for the good work it does.  After all, it has gotten a four star (highest) rating from the Charity Navigator in both the Financial and Accountability and Transparency categories.  And Hillary’s health is as good as it could be considering the grueling demands of her present campaign which she is determined to meet.  The majority of the negative press concerning Hillary, (which has been wholly unwarranted they explain with a sigh), has been a media creation as conceived by their Republican bosses.  As yet, I haven’t read any speculation by supporters as to how a couple such as Bill and Hillary have managed to amass a personal fortune of one hundred eleven million dollars from careers dedicated to public ‘service’.

 

However, now and then there is a glitch in the major media’s digital feeding pipe.  Other sources report that Hillary’s physical problems are most likely due to the progression of Parkinson’s Disease like symptoms… wandering eye, repeated odd gestures, mental freeze when startled, falls, and pneumonia due to swallowing difficulties.  There is a YouTube feed of NBC purportedly altering a wandering eye in a snippet of video from a campaign stop.  There is her reticence to meet with the press and to do public events.  Her crowds are shown to have been Photoshop enlarged. 

 There are also maverick news sources which pop-up here and there which give a much different view of what is occurring both here and abroad.  They show a Europe whose cities are under siege from a flood of immigrants.  They show a leader defending Brexit.  They show people describing perpetrators of terrorist attacks as Muslim.  They show scientists and reporters with graphs and charts which deny that Climate Change is primarily a humanly caused crisis.  They contradict the current governmental and media opinion in numerous areas such as, gun control, religious freedom, women’s equal wage, abortion and the fetal parts market…  It goes on.  Wikileaks seems to have shown a huge light both on the lax security of Hillary’s home server, and also for its use as a way of directing monies to the Clinton Charities which would seem to have been more likely a money-for-influence ‘laundering’ operation.  Regular updates by former highly connected people such as Dick Morris, Chief Political Advisor for both Bill and Hillary for 20 years, would seem legitimate – though they come to us via the offices of the National Enquirer. 

 We get these glimmers of contradictory information which break through the major media boilerplate, but are they true and real?

 

Hillary fans are also strong supporters of government intervention (i.e. coercion).  It is Trump supporters who are generally the ones ‘intervened’ with – ‘for their own good’.   Hillary supporters see Government as a force for progress, “on the right side of history”, and well worth the taxes we all should pay.  Their opponents on the contrary see Government as a farce for progress marching ineluctably towards a dystopian end.

Which side of the struggle do you side with?  Which side do you believe?  Which is presenting reality, and which the dream?

For myself, I generally side with the Volunteers, and fight the Coercives…  No matter how pleasant the Coercives’ pitch, the sound of their voices, the sweetness of their personalities, their charisma, or how much good they purportedly do or the ends to which they are purportedly headed, such as the ‘right side of history’… I don’t like coercion.

 

You ever have to get your hands dirty?  Say, while doing some septic or foundation work.  And you look at a particular difficulty and think, ‘This is going to take a BIG hammer.’

 

Donald Trump , Hillary’s people say,  grabs and deplores women, is poorly informed, rarely reads and is an entirely selfish, narcissistic, authoritarian, billionaire megalomaniac – who probably is not worth a fraction of what he claims and is mentally ill.   This is all delivered up within a yummy mix of charges including racism, misogyny, bigotry, fascism, sexism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, and of just plain base, obtuse, boorish bullying.  On top of this he is afflicted with incredibly bad hair and just being an all-over, absolute, ‘just total’, asshole.

 

This sounds like a really BIG hammer, to me! 

 

 

For more by Carl Nelson, visit:  www.magicbooks.co