Reaffirmations for Summer 2020: Idealism and Distress.

You know: when you talk about Idealism, you’re talking about just how great and awesome Life would be if only everyone did just a little more. A little here, a little there. To be a little bit more open, or a little bit more kind. To work a little harder, so that those who have to pick up lots of slack enjoy a life that’s easier by far than what they would have had to do instead. Usually, the Idealists are the sorts of people who WOULD do all these things, and they often have to push themselves so much each day to make things work for those around them. Since the Idealists often excel in these qualities, it is predictable that those who fall behind might grow envious of them, and if those shortcomings might be rationalized and recast as virtues, the Idealist might even be portrayed as intrusive. Yet one conceit which is entirely beyond justification is the accusation of self-interest. It may be true that such a change as the Idealist envisions would be of inestimable relief to one’s Self, which stands to benefit by a far greater margin than those who disadvantage themselves ever so slightly. Yet the simple fact that their disadvantage is so minor and the Idealist’s advantage is so great is precisely what renders the transformation Just, for such a set of affairs may only come to pass when, up until this time, the Idealist has had to shoulder an unreasonable burden on behalf of the average person.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

The Damsel in Distress is one of the oldest archetypes for a reason, since she represents the birth of the boy’s moral development. She presents him with a challenge: given power over a helpless embodiment of femininity, one doubling as sex object and mother figure, he has the choice whether to inflict harm or healing. While boys who grow up on hero myths might easily inherit a feeling of entitlement to those whom they rescue, the deal works, since the rescue is executed and the greater evil assuaged by the Hero, however self-interested the intent.

The simple act of choosing heroism over exploitation is an exercise in self-restraint, courage, and conviction, all invariably heroic qualities, not because they cannot be corrupted towards ill ends, but rather because higher goals cannot be attained without them, and these higher goals are not mere pretensions but rather expressions of the longings of the most piteous and helpless victims.

The Damsel in Distress is not disgraced by her powerlessness, since most often it is the fate of those possessing a more mysterious power: that of vulnerability and innocence. The Damsel in Distress redeems the Hero’s cumbersome and heavy-handed masculinity, but only by being totally vulnerable to him, grotesque though this predicament might appear, and rightfully so, for it was produced by the exploitative means of her villainous captor. The very distinction between the role of captor and liberator, by one’s own choice, establishes the boy as a man, superior in dignity.

At that point, though, the challenge falls to the maiden, for she undergoes the same sort of transformation. If she feels no debt of gratitude towards him, or, feeling it, she acts against it, she has remained a girl, a child of the Universe, entitled to her own innocence but not much else. Her rescuer is like a Father Figure to her, whose love must be unconditional by default, so that she owes him nothing in return, and if he should argue otherwise, he becomes a tyrannical abuser, no better than her ogrish captors.

In this context, it is no surprise if she should seek the company of her fellow girls, who coddle her and assure her that, since she was innocent to begin with, she owes her savior nothing, for he was simply preserving the Natural Order of Things, and, if his intent were self-interested, then she ought to be commended for deceiving him towards beneficent means, and the test of his character will ultimately lie in his absence of personal passion, regardless of whether such a feeling of entitlement would precede or follow the Heroic Act. 

Yet clearly such a matriarchal conceit does not live up to the ideals of any Goddess of Justice, for it forces all men to renounce their own bodies completely in service to weak women, feeble and restrained not only of body but of Heart and Mind, the latter by their own Nature and Volition, disincentivizing many men and producing not only more villains but, among women, a greater tolerance for villainous, barbaric “men” without “creepy” ulterior agendas.

It should be obvious, however, that such agendas represent not so much a hidden evil but a biological longing for moral order, one which redeems the human body as a Source of Moral Authority. The woman who rewards her Saviour with Love becomes akin to a Goddess in her own right, whereas the other remains a temptress and a child. Just as the boy who takes advantage of the Damsel fails a test of Manhood, the girl who does not honour his sacrifice fails to mature into a Woman. Their reciprocity is dependent upon the trust the boy places in the girl by setting her free, as well as the respect she shows for his hopes for the two of them.

In Actual Life, these sorts of relationships govern all good business, for while we all must fend for ourselves we are tasked with doing so by noble means, noble means which, since they are essential, cannot be separated from practical life by being sublimated as ascetic martyrdom. In business, we all want something, but we must be willing to risk loss in order to empower our associates, that they might reciprocate. 

This risk is no more an invitation to say “No” than the bondage of the Damsel in Distress is a form of consent. Disappointments in business are not the results of lofty expectations but of treacheries; the lofty expectation is, in fact, the End in and of Itself, the Goal without the pursuit of which nothing good gets done. 

When I throw the ball to you, you do not call me arrogant for expecting you to catch it, and though I part with it willingly, it is not with the expectation that you might do with it whatever you will, but rather that you will serve the team as I intended for you to. So it is in Love, and this is but one function of the Hero’s encounter with the Damsel in Distress. These stories are not merely the sublimation of perverse heterosexual fantasies; they are tests in refinement for deep-seated and inextricable biological impulses. Maturity for the Man lies in the boy’s ability to set the girl free; maturity for the Woman lies in her ability to reward him. All else is simply conjecture; the moment that we begin to deconstruct the intent of the Hero,

“… the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought;

And enterprises of great pith and moment,

With this regard, their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action.”

The Good Life always comes at a price.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

PARAS!TE: FULL REV!EW.

THE ETHOS:

In the eighteenth century, during the European Enlightenment, morality plays took a turn in favour of revolutionary views, the likes of which Marx and his followers adopted to varying degrees of success and atrocious failure in the centuries that followed. Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni is a prime example of this subversive trend; the librettist who wrote those ingenious lyrics which Mozart set to music later moved to the United States. Retelling the tale of Don Juan, the four-hour epic depicts an ignoble nobleman who terrorizes peasants who are extremely civilized. (Of course, our own Slavoj Zizek might take issue with the term “civilized”, but in so doing he represents part of the problem I describe.) Admittedly, most of what Don Giovanni does throughout those four hours might even pass for admirable achievement in our present day, but only because so many men are either self-absorbed or easily pushed over. His only sins that stand the scrutiny of time are rape and murder, though one must keep in mind that, according to the old morality, the former would be hardly worse than the remainder of his lechery, since personal consent was less important, even during the Enlightenment, than conformism to standards, and even the most radical Enlightenment thinker wouldn’t have dared to suggest that chastity, as a social imperative, was simply the product of envy.

By illustrating the poor in a noble light and the noble in a poor light, the greatest dramatists of the Enlightenment managed to draw a sharp distinction between social hierarchy and moral hierarchy. Nobility was not a quality either exclusive to nor guaranteed within the Nobles, even if it was in fact the Noble Class which had produced it as a standard. So long as you could romanticize peasants as behaving like chivalrous princes, contending with a lecherous rich man, you could not only expose the corruption which wealth is heir to but also you could begin to Universalize Nobility as a standard transcending social station. The Cardinal Virtues are not simply behaviours which the Priesthood adopts because the Church can afford to sponsor them; they are archetypes that live within the very Heart of Human Nature, planted there by God, available to any thinking man. Rafael, the Angel of Forgiveness, is no different in quintessence from Guanyin, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, of whom the Dalai Lama is the avatar. Goodness and Evil transcend cultural boundaries, and they are untethered by the mortal norms of class.

This flame was not so easily extinguished by modernity as we might suspect. While Breaking Bad might have set the stage for shows like Ozark, wherein every character is deplorable, its artistic achievement was twofold: that it not only presented a sympathetic villain, but it established such a stark contrast between his villainous fate and his heroic beginnings that viewers could not help but to end up blaming the same man they were rooting for. This was precisely Vince Gilligan’s goal: to teach viewers that “actions have consequences”. His genius was in creating villains so engaging that there was no sympathy left by the end; we had already expended it.

Even more successful artistically to this end, if not commercially, is the prequel Better Call Saul. As Jimmy McGill transforms into Saul Goodman, his stoic counterpart Mike becomes a hitman. The central themes are usually conveyed by Mike himself, who doubles as a Wise Old Man and as a Gatekeeper, eventually becoming a tragic hero. One of Mike’s earliest monologues, addressed to an upstart criminal named Pryce, (an I.T. specialist who decides to sell stolen pharmaceuticals for a profit,) is upon the difference between a “criminal” and a “bad guy”. “You took something that wasn’t yours, and you sold it for a profit, which now makes you a criminal. Good one? Bad one? That’s up to you.” Mike recognizes that our moral standing in Life is independent of our legal standing. It follows logically that it is also independent of our economic standing, especially if economics can be reduced to social standing in an institution such as the Law. Mike repeatedly refuses money, even when his family’s in dire straits, when he believes that he has not earned it. This sets him apart from Ignacio Varga, who can sympathize with Mike’s robbery of a drug lord’s trucks, but not with the vendetta which motivated it. Nacho Varga doesn’t have the sorts of responsibilities which Mike has, since Mike acts also as a provider for his widowed daughter-in-law and his granddaughter, whereas Nacho’s father has always planned for Nacho to inherit a thoroughly decent family business. Mike simply retains his devotion to the Spirit of the Law, even after having quit his post as a cop in an extremely corrupt precinct. Ignacio, who has chosen to defy his father’s wishes by allying himself with the Cartel, ends up fending for life, enabling a string of murders and injuries in his wake. When he receives a blood transfusion from one of a pair of iconic Cartel twins, it represents both the duality of his nature and his transformation into a drug lord.

THE PATHOS:

By far, the evilest villain in the film Parasite turns out to have been the patriarch of the parasitic family. Not only does he do nothing to stop his family from committing the original con, acting as far less than the stoic source of moral fortitude and equanimity which his initial character foil, Mr. Park, exhibits, but his profound envy for this gentleman sparks a neurosis which, over a very short time, escalates into the most senseless act of murder. It is by no mistake that the two men wear the feathers of Native Americans at the climax of the film, for what they represent is that rage which, either robbed of civilizing grace or having never seen it, lashes out with infantile destruction at the alien world of wealth and sophistication. What the patriarch of the parasitic family represents is self-entitlement, expressed as the raw will to destroy that which it desires. Mr. Kim wants to live Mr. Park’s life; he even goes so far as to covet the wife. Yet it is his negligence, his heavy-handed arrogance, one alien to seasoned criminals, (the likes of which we see in Breaking Bad, for instance, or even Death Note,) that dooms his family, for when they have the perfect opportunity to plan their grand ascension to the plane of wealth instead they waste it, pilfering the secrets of their hosts, intoxicating themselves in a manner only native to the unaristocratic. They know neither the reserve to leave the door unanswered when the old housekeeper comes to knock, nor do they feel the shame and the disgust which would in such a matter warrant sympathy for her and her husband. It is because they fail to answer for their sins against the family, creeping about within the dark, that Kim bears witness to the act of love between Park and his blushing wife. Park and his wife are also envious, their act of love modeled after some fantasy of rundown life, but it’s a fantasy that has been planted by the daughter of the Kims, and they do nothing but to act it out in what they falsely think is privacy. The Parks are kind enough to hide their civilized disgust when they discover panties in the back of their own car, and it is nothing short of this that lands the parasitic patriarch his gig at the expense of someone younger and more qualified, if not yet “needy”, so to speak. Yet how can this Mr. Kim deplore them for what they should say in privacy? It is offense to which he only walks by his own secret path, rather than a directed insult. What he hates is not what his host DOES, but rather what the host PERCEIVES, and in that rests the seeds of a psychosis, for the narcissist, refusing to perceive his own foul stench, hates most the thought that others turn their noses up at it behind his back. It is for this reason that Mr. Kim winds up living down in the crawlspace, in the place of the same maniac who nearly killed his son and stabbed the hosts nearly to death. It seems that all is lost during the struggle between the recluse and the Kims’ son, but as it turns out it’s the early victim who will live to tell the tale. At that moment when the ritual of decency is interrupted by an act of madness, Mr. Park behaves the most responsibly, lifting the car keys from beneath the carcass of the man who nearly killed his wife and child. There is no question at this moment that Park is the Better Man, but as the stench of his assailant fills his nostrils Mr. Kim is so reminded of this stark superiority between them that he is possessed, as if by Cain, to kill the father right before the wife. Kim’s wife and son survive, but at that moment the Parks’ lives are over, where before there had been yet a feeble hope at dignity and even healing. Let us not forget that all of this went on without the Park’s say-so or knowledge; they had no idea, thinking themselves kind. Their one sin was living that one life which all the others wanted; their one error was permitting others even partial access to this life. A rational man would rejoice, knowing that at least someone kindly had been able to enjoy what he was yet to know. Yet madness works in other ways. Kim’s lust for “simple” Mrs. Park is clear when he first holds her hand, and hearing Mr. Park fondle her breast and all the while denounce his stink engenders jealousy the likes of which not even I can fathom. A True Man would sooner have confessed to all his sins in that one moment than to let the ruse go on. But the coward had no recourse but to crawl back into poverty, a circumstance that would arouse our pity but not our solidarity, for in that moment it was chosen by the victim. Kim had the capacity for murder then, but he had not the plan to do so, leaving it up to his son’s device. The women in the family, by this point, came to recognize the lodgers underground as equals, where before their senseless rivalry for ample resources had doomed them nearly to exposure. Yet the lies the daughter wove came back to haunt them, for just as the ladies of the family were ready to thus offer up their peace, the lady of the Parks came carrying a cake which had been baked not just to celebrate the birthday of her son but to help him to cope with trauma, a trauma fabricated by the Kims. It’s in this moment that their son tries to murder the lodgers, all for wanting what he had, just as his father kills their host for having only what they wanted. Hence the madman becomes the latter foil for Kim.

THE LOGOS:

One of the peculiar qualities of the Park family which is typical of underdeveloped characters (in developed countries) is just how little we truly know about them. This fact renders it impossible to blame them without making irrational inferences from outside the text, which would be a major faux pas in the Post-Derridean contemporary world. For instance, we cannot call them “capitalists” in the Marxist sense any more so than we might call Andy Bernard’s ancestors “slave owners”; though neoliberal Oscar Martinez would love to be able to prove Nellie’s inflated claims to be factual, Bernard is accurate in describing his ancestors as “moral middlemen”: conscientious, hardworking participants in a corrupt Social Order which, by a Kantian estimation, required them to conform in spite of personal reservations and subjective doubts. As far as we are aware, the Host Family in Parasite is most likely tantamount to this, only because most people in their estimated income bracket (presuming upon the quality of their luxuries) are in the same position: they are not business owners, so they are not capitalists in the Marxist sense. If they were brought up in a “bubble”, they surpass in dignity those nouveau riche who have had to “work to get there”. While it is charming and sadly endearing to hear people from the ghetto share their dreams of wealth and power (and one often does, as I have, having spent a lot of time in urban sectors and encountered many locals,) one recalls that, were they better educated, they would not speak so proudly of their entrepreneurial dreams and realities. By the most economically left-leaning, liberal definition available, the one supplied by the notorious Karl Marx, those who manage to move up the social ladder by their will and work alone are in fact MORE corrupt than those who are born into “privilege”, since such upward mobility requires them to make a PROFIT, which Marx systematically proves to be directly proportional to and, in fact, synonymous with, exploitation, selling out their fellows in the process. This process of “selling out” is precisely what the Kim family demonstrates. Conversely, the Park family exhibits behaviours which are far more emblematic of another archetype, that of the Child: Innocence. While their patriarch exhibits the stoic condescension of his station, his actual choices, though they always portend unrelenting cosmic retribution, are invariably advantageous to the Kims, whom he grows to trust as much as his childlike wife does. The Parks, though they retain internal feelings of disgust, never allow these personal biases to skew their public behaviour, extending an attitude of trusting compassion even to their hired help, except for when they are MISLED, calculatedly, to make cancellations. While this ideal is one to which we might feel rightfully entitled, it’s not a frequent fact, so we ought to be grateful to the Parks, for they exhibit all these graces willingly and willfully. To the same extent as it is “easy” for them to be good, it is just as easy for them to be evil, and their choices therefore act as the definitive arbiter in the revelation of their character. If the Kim family finds within the depths of that character a private contempt, it is only because the Kims have betrayed the trust of the Parks by creeping into their private, innermost lives. When government entities in countries purported to be Leftist behave in this manner, Snowden supporters worldwide profess that the government betrayed both the People and its own Ideals for them.

If Parasite is a metaphor, then who are we to read it just one way? Are the Kims not, in fact, more akin to the capitalists in the works of Marx than the Parks are? Foremost anti-capitalist Slavoj Zizek holds a similar interpretation of subtext in The Sound of Music, insisting that the more subtle viewer will notice extremely proto-Fascist tendencies in the villagers who serve as that film’s protagonists, whereas the Germans they defy are tantamount to a Nazi’s conception of the Jewish Elite. If we can systematically demonstrate that the Kims exhibit the violent, sociopathic, and exploitative tendencies of a nineteenth-century Industrialist, then how can we continue to sympathize with them, as liberals?

Hidden Leeches: So, Who Were the Parasites?

Of course, here the director himself offers a counterintuitive interpretation of his own work, by suggesting that the Parks were Parasites as WELL. Of course, such an observation could never absolve either party of its crimes, for crimes are often crimes not just against an “exploited party” but also against an Overlying Law; if anything, being equated with the Parks in dignity gives Mr. Kim far less excuse for envy, unless he cares nothing for dignity itself. Yet such a degree of sophistication in moral calculation is probably lost already upon any class of people that calls the Parks “parasites”.

The most narcissistic delusion is that of Godhood, and since a God can deny his own delusions from a position of Divine Authority, any man who believes himself to be a God is the most hopeless case in this regard. What is the significance of Divinity? A Deity is like a genie without the shackles; he or she can will anything into existence, at least enough so as to satisfy his or her own needs. It is only in Buddhism that the Gods are considered unhappy in direct proportion to their power, and that is only because Buddhism rejects power.

A self-made man is a God Incarnate: an entity who fashions, by his or her own volition alone, the entirety of his or her own conditions. It does not take a Freud or Jung to see this grandiosity for what it is. Yet, somehow, when we see people relying upon other people, we treat them as though they were less than human, as though human beings were Gods and Goddesses. While cooking and driving are hardly metaphysical powers, (I, myself, possess at least one of them) it’s not a mark of shame to hire a private cook or a driver. This is because human beings are communal creatures; as Alasdair MacIntyre said, (and as I quote, quite shamelessly, for I agree with him*:) we are “dependent, rational animals”. The Parks are not exploiting the Kims by providing them with a source of income in exchange for a service. While the most cursory reading of Marx would call this “exchange-value” into question, the seemingly generous NATURE of the Parks, already exposed by their willful and “easy” goodness, leaves it up to them to decide how MUCH to pay the Kims, and it leaves it up to us to infer that it’s probably a “fair amount”, hardly synonymous with exploitation.

*Not only do I quote him because I agree with him; I am also unashamed in doing so, because I agree with him that there is nothing to be ashamed of herein.

Post-Shamanic Human Beings form societies based upon the division of specialized labour, and while this division lends itself to hierarchical structures it also makes possible a state of interdependence wherein ethics and commerce, working hand in hand, ensure both the production and the distribution of resources which possess Marx’s “use-value”. Yet the lingering credibility of Marx, especially in the current Zeitgeist, is not in his depth of research into the statistics of the prior centuries, an academic rigour the likes of which we do not find in millennials. It’s rather in the shocking accounts of factory conditions that Marx sets his morality play, in terms so plain and detached that they prefigure the ominous stylings of Realism and Modernist Theatre. At first blush, the Kim family’s living circumstances seem most reminiscent of these stark conditions. Yet no tragedy is complete without a villain and a tragic hero. In the case of the Kims, they are both, because of their choices.

Since ethics remain ethics irrespective of personal conditions, and as we have demonstrated that the most liberally sound people are those who do not change social class, wherever they may be situated, it would be daft to agree with Mrs. Kim’s drunken assertion that the Park family’s kindness is inauthentic because it comes easily as a function of privileged wealth. Our only warrant would lie in an even baser presumption: that people only do good things to feel good, and only when it requires neither effort nor sacrifice. When you see how instinctive depravity is for the Kims, it’s unsurprising.

The Sins of Kim:

We know very little about the Parks, but we know almost all there is to know about the Kims. The son betrays his best friend in the first half hour of the film, if I am not mistaken, seducing a young girl whose death he eventually brings about, thinking only of his own alienation. This same son, an adolescent boy scarcely older than Yagami Light, takes it upon himself to murder a man far less fortunate than he, who in turn attempts to kill his “Gods” upstairs. The Kim family’s matriarch shows no recrimination in getting members of their fellow working class fired to make room for narcissistic dreams of upward mobility. Where is that sense of Marxist Solidarity in the Sub-basement, when for the first time the Kims have to confront the impact of their enterprise upon an even lower class? Are these the sorts of people to presume that wealth is heir to malice? If so, it’s clearly the poor characters who are living in a bubble, unaware of even themselves, for it would take just one look in the mirror (provided by the character foil of the Squatters) to see that, in this Universe, wealth is not inversely proportional to loyalty and kindness, but directly so. The poor people are the most murderous, the wealthy are the most generous, and if this were not so, we wouldn’t need to stoop to the childish claim that it’s “easy for them to be good”. Yes: it WOULD be easy, except that the Kims, simply by CONTENDING this, make no attempt to BE good, sealing by this excuse the fates of all involved. Their power is neither that of privilege nor labour, but of duplicity and ruthlessness. While it seems tautological at first to use their claims against them, since it was precisely that same claim about privileged morality that I sought to disprove, a simple accounting of willful immorality ought to expose that claim for what it is: a pragmatic LIE, one believed by the liar, as all narcissistic fantasies are. It’s iconic, therefore, that the one member of the Kim family who dies, rightfully, is the daughter, for of all of them this counterfeiter is the most blatant con artist, without whom none of the criminal enterprise would have worked. If you can be fooled into sympathizing with her family, you are among the naïve.

The Park Family is the only family which lives a Good Life, both morally and financially. Yet hundreds of years of progressive theater and Leftist economics prove that this is not always the case. Often, rich people suck, and poor people rock. Yet what you find in the Parks is a consummation devoutly to be wished. Critics who grow queasy at the sight of a Westerner interpreting Korean economics and reinterpreting Modern Korean Art would do well to recount the North Koreans who protest Modern Art; dissent can be manufactured under authoritarian regimes. While we DESERVE artistic license, Nature does not entitle us to it. By the same token, while Nature does not entitle everyone to the Good Life, financially, we all DESERVE it, insofar as we are willing to work towards it MORALLY. The Parks do not exploit anyone to get ahead, so they are not capitalists. Yet they use their wealth in a thoroughly moral fashion, suggesting, with dramatic irony, that it would be wasted upon their hired help, though they themselves never seem to believe this, even inviting their employees to their son’s birthday party. The Parks cannot be expected to give it all up to charity and to join a protest in the streets, and this is precisely BECAUSE they live in South Korea, whose closest neighbor to the North would gobble up a Leftist uprising in a jiffy. (Probably taking a full accounting of resistors to the fight, ensuring that their families would be cursed for future generations.) As a Moldovan citizen born in Moscow in 1991, believe me when I say that I am NOT just your typical white American in holding this position. The complacency of the Kims is only natural, and, in Asian fashion, they elevate Nature to an Art. If you still believe that they should be Marxists instead, consider how much sympathy the poorest of the poor characters – the Squatters – have for North Korean propaganda.

IN SUMMARY:

Bong Joon-ho’s submagnum opus Parasite is not a film about “class” any more so than the O.J. Simpson trial was about a red-handed glove. (Of course, that trial was hardly about “race” either, by the same token.) Parasite is a film about parasitism, envy, sociopathy, madness, and the murder of innocents for socioeconomic, ideological reasons. The truest tragedy is that the men who wrote and created the film don’t even seem to recognize what they have done. Mr. Kim bewails his own sin and resolves himself to his retribution. The lingering sympathy that conventional viewers apparently feel for him is symptomatic of a far more devious sociopathy.

[({Dm.A.A.||R.G.)}]

DREAM2252020:

The dream took place in the Dream Theater on the night of the premiere. Everyone from Theory II as well as the entire cast and crew of Mamma Mi were probably in attendance. I had to run about considerably, barely missing call times and doing my best to brush off feelings of severe guilt. One cannot help these things; one must simply thank God and Nature for those that one was able to save, who were not murdered by one’s negligence, all in that ever-looming Spirit of libertarian abandon that haunts the Dream of Freedom.

It seems, doesn’t it, as though there are TWO theaters in these dreams, and I simply divide my time betwixt them. This is not to say that the stories are without their familiar share of travel, migration from one form of temporary housing to another. Perhaps this is a metaphor for astrology; perhaps this represents reincarnation and, more topically (on a lesser scale) but inclusively, (presuming upon a Scientific epistemology wherein the most inclusive definition must consider the most banal interpretations) rebirth in general.

Who knows? All memories of recent dreams, spanning the last five years, are interspersed in the attempts to recall any one of them. It seems that my Dream Self, at least, is not so negligent as to forget them.

Are my visits to Downtown San Diego, both in and out of Actuality, not performances as well? I would do well to recall the nights that I succeeded in such ventures. A single night spent beside Tina ought to outweigh my indignation before two dozen immature women.

I pause the Chicago Symphony as the conductor lifts his arms to signal the introduction of the Ode to Joy. What timing my God has!! I am thankful that He brings Shame to light only so as to expose it for the fraud it is.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

The FUGUE:

Walter White was in a Fugue State. Knowing his true identity, if not his whereabouts, I had nonetheless to lead an investigation into the absurd theory (which I was prone to discredit) that he was having an affair with the tall, blonde single Witch Next Door. We could not gain any easy access to her room, but in the process of investigation I must have met her. She greeted me in a robe with considerable enthusiasm. If I have to come to think of it, she was not blonde, but brunette. At some point I must have actually worked with her to break into Walt’s Secret Bedroom, or perhaps something to that effect. I had hoped she might lean in close to me in that brown robe; I’d not expected she would lounge upon the bed naked and ready when I turned around. I guess this WAS her room, after all; she seemed very much at home in it. And I made myself at home inside of her, as well.

Walt had to escape the room somehow. He had to use his crawlspace. His family was content to simply break through the door, which was all ready shoddy any way, so it collapsed overhead as they made their exit. He had been found, but his secret remained just that: secret.

I spent a long time crashing at Doctor Byrne’s Place. When mom and dad left town they left me with a rental car I could not legally drive but that I parked in Doctor Byrne’s garage. At some point, seeing how it had been parked, I must have wondered if it was my own garage. At any rate: it certainly was my own car. The dream played with the theme that possessions are simply evaluations of objects rather than relationships with the Primordial Thou that is ubiquitous In All Beings.

The time came one day to take my leave of Doctor Byrne; I could no longer weigh upon her hospitality. I’d overstayed my welcome; she did not have to tell me that verbally for me to get the message. A stay that began on a Thursday (incidentally: when I last had her class) ended I think upon a Tuesday. It was time to return home. I can imagine why; my first Programming Midterm this semester happens this Wednesday. I want to spend the weekend in My Comfort Zone: in Music. But if time has past to face the Music, it is time to face the Math. In the same manner as I had to leave the Coffeehouse and came back last night to the Game Store, affect must yield to logic in order for them to come into Balance.

Dm.A.A.

F!SH!NG FOR AQUAR!US:

Early in my career in Oceanside, most probably after having returned from my first sick leave, and well after I had fallen in love with the Fair Fisher, I had a dream that alerted me that I was failing Dui Nguyen’s Video Game Programming class. The dream was set in what was all most unmistakably an Aquarium, and the record may still show that to be the case. This morning I came to the same realization, and by that I mean the same location. Going off the beaten course (let it be called the Curriculum) I overheard a group of Popular Kids (let them be called my recent coworkers, Front of House) speaking of an elite party in a Group Bubble Bath Tank. (or whatever its formal name had been.)

The remainder of the dream saw me descending the ranks, as it were, of the enormous Aquarium building, taking stairs and escalators and various conveyors of the like to find this seemingly mythic Bubble Bath. I had never heard or seen it before; somehow it had all ways evaded my gaze.

At some point within the main shopping area outside I passed Alexa Arenz. I thought that perhaps I could evade her recognition but then thought myself silly for hoping it, either because it was so futile or so fruitless of a motive, and upon some level I must have presumed that anything this difficult to do would not be expected of me, hence the point in trying would be lost alongside the point in succeeding.

She recognized me, and she smiled, not even awkwardly but listlessly. I guess I never made her list, either. She acted as though nothing had transpired between us, but she could not hide her urgency in disappearing.

For some reason, if you’re not expected to care for her, and if caring could be misconstrued as creepy, then you’re not expected to care when she vanishes.

11:50 A.M.

10/12/2018.

Day of Venus.

(Friday; Viernes/Vendredi.)

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

V!NCE:

I dreamt that I was the proprietor of a two-story theatre known as the O’Cidre Playhouse. (A reference at once to people from Oceanside [“O’siders”], the Cidrehouse from Chekhov’s play, and in some bizarre, Joycean way, to the Irish People.)

Upon the second floor I often played cards with the players of the Company. Ordinarily I was their ringleader, although today I noticed that I was greeted with a cold, collective glare. The Dealer said he knew that I’d been cheating. I pretended not to know how so: that I’d been playing with a Tarot Deck instead of a French Deck, availing myself of twenty-two trump cards rather than the standard two. I played the Fool and then went home.

Downstairs, my wife greeted me, though not with a loving smile. She had gotten wind, apparently, that I had been cheating on her. She decided to leave me for the man who tipped her off. I begged her to stay for just one drink, but she only grimaced and departed. As I ran after her, stopping at the top of the last, dark staircase (for she had escaped into the Catacombs beneath the building) I discovered that within my hand lay not a bottle of wine but a can of Red Bull.

At this moment the door bell rang. I opened it, trembling but eager for company. It was my wife’s informant. He informed me now that I was found guilty of espionage. My wife had sold out my secrets to the National Security Agency. I reached for the scissors, first to stab him, but he drew his wand. I stepped back, held up my free hand, and with a free hand’s style removed my left ear. I pled with this ear, begging him not to take me away or to turn me into something weird. He simply sighed, as the tip of his wand lit up, replying, “you were never so great of a painter as to try that schtick, Vince.”

Dm.A.A.

Diagnosis and Treatment:

I had a very bizarre dream recently.

Inexplicably, though not for the first time, I was employed by my secret society to serve as a professional driver. About suburban San Diego I drove daily in a tan car referred to as a High Lander, in search of lost dogs, that they might be returned to their owners for a ransom (which had been referred to by my coworkers as a Taxation upon Negligence). Though both my physical skills and judgement were poor, I was selected for this occupation because of my surpassing Knowledge of magik and my ruthless, unscrupulous attitude towards being the bearer of bad news for poor people. It was challenging, stressful and risky.

I enjoyed that about it. But the heyday was behind me. The turning point came to me when a tiny whelp, once of a surpassing loyalty to me, eluded me. I chased it all the way back to my South Node, only to discover that the whelp was picked up by a rival driver who looked just like me. It was at this moment that I realized that one of the two of us had to die. And then my teeth began to fall out.

I drove North, past a sign that read “You are Now Leaving Gemini, Land of the Evil Twins.” I found a Dental Office at 673 Dental Damnation Street, situated upon the eighth floor, just above an Office that read “Crowns and Fillings”.

The D.D.S. informed me that my entire problem had me at its epicenter, and that it was my absence of basic compassion for Others, coupled with my obsessive and incisive intellect, that was to blame for both the gravity of my situation and for the loss of those same bloody incisors. I tend to lower the vibration everywhere about me, draining emotion through the loophole and the crevasse of fear, finding only fault or use in Others. I wanted to contest that by finding fault with me he demonstrated a Common Guilt, but my protest was impeded by the inconvenience of toothless gums. Any way: he was the Boss, apparently.

He told me that I was a fool for thinking I could attain a Common Good by sacrificing the underprivileged, and in the wake of such transparent self-interest my plaints (that it was someone else whose personal agenda had self-interest At Heart) had lost their bite entirely. My last recourse was to enlist within the Service. So I did.

Doctor Knows best.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

The Magic FLEET:

Most of my magic happens at night.

In your sleep? Are you at least lucid?

Well: it’s like a video game. The better you get at it, the more you forget it isn’t real.

So you aren’t even lucid.

I can let that go.

Dm.A.A.

I have had recurring dreams of the Great Voyage. It seems that this last night the Voyage was expanded to include a larger number of vessels, a great deal of whom were probably available to me when I first began this dream record in 2013. The symbolism is transparent to me now; the carriers are my CAREERS. Reading Joyce allows me to unriddle the manner in which dreams intrinsically use pun in order to convey a double-meaning. Ali, with his neurotic fixation upon post-structural philosophy, which I’d absorbed by force of psychic habit, but for which I feel no shame in disowning it with fleeting bitterness, transcending that cocoon and taking leave of that guest-house, would never have fathomed the TRUTH of Dreams Themselves because he was so self-identified with the ego of the artist who claims (in Leo fashion) that the products of his Unconscious Mind are His Own. They are only partially so. It is not that the ego alone conveys the tendencies of dreams through pun and collage, as in Finnegan’s Wake. It is that dreams themselves, as Joyce surely noted, speak in pun and double-meaning. It might have taken me five years to fathom (pun intended, though by whom?) but it is obvious to me now, for instance that the flying ships were Aircraft Carriers, and as aircraft themselves, a conveyance up into the Clouds, they were careers. The larger vessels were corporate, whereas the smaller ones were accessed through the misty black depths of Childhood; hence the jungle gym leads by some bridge to a ship that is all so DERIVED from its structure in the manner that a Church (transmuted into a classroom at San Diego State University, which would house an awards ceremony for a Debate tournament) can be salvaged from the bones of a dead ship. The wooden vessels are my entrepreneurial pursuits; the larger warcraft are the corporate means to finance this. They all comprise a common fleet.

Why was I so alone in dream last night? It can’t be too puzzling to unriddle. Tonight I close alone again. It is a dignity surpassing: a rite of passage that endowed me with record-breaking morning wood the following day, when despite a haze of exhaustion I was still proud to speak of my achievement to my Beloved.

Such is Life. It is a solitary quest, hopping from career to career, in pursuit of that Great North Shore: the North Node.

11:12 A.M.

8/6/2018.

The time is twelve minutes into the twelfth hour. The numbers are eleven and twelve: Aquarius and Pisces. I count my blessings quite literally upon this morning of the sixth day of the eighth month of the 2018^th year after Christ.

It’s going to be a lovely day.

Dm.A.A.

Various Magick:

From the Art of Manliness:

"The Shadows of the Magician Archetype

The Detached Manipulator

The Magician in his fullness desires to initiate other men into his knowledge, bringing them up from degree to degree so that they can become better and happier men. The Manipulator Shadow poses as the Magician in his fullness–he teases would-be initiates with the prospect of learning his secrets, but he does not give them all his knowledge. He withholds things from them in order to feed both his pride and his pocketbook. Shadow Manipulators charge their seekers a ton of money with the promise that the student can become just like them, but don’t give away the real secrets to doing that, and especially the secret that they often can’t become just like them, because their own success was due to x,y, or z factor that won’t happen to anyone else.

The internet has created an army of Shadow Manipulators. Everywhere you look there are hucksters promising you the secrets to bedding women, losing weight, making money online…if you’ll only buy their $200 eBook.

Shadow manipulators play a prominent role on our cultural stage as well. Wall Street bankers, politicians, ad agencies, and media pundits are all absolute experts in getting a following by sharing some of the story, but not all of it.

Another aspect of the Manipulator is his cynical detachment from other people. I see this Shadow in guys too often. They’re the ones who, when confronted with their inability to commit to anything, be passionate about anything, or enjoy any pleasures in life, will retort with “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Moore summarizes this man’s issues very well:

“This is the man who thinks too much, who stands back from his life and never lives it. He is caught in a web of pros and cons about his decisions and lost in a labyrinth of reflective meanderings from which he cannot extricate himself. He is afraid to live, to ‘leap into battle.’ He can only sit on his rock and think. The years pass. He wonders where the time has gone. And he ends by regretting a life of sterility. He is a voyeur, an armchair adventurer. In the world of academia, he is a hairsplitter. In the fear of making the wrong decision, he makes none. In his fear of living, he also cannot participate in the joy and pleasure that other people experience in their lived lives. If he is withholding from others, and not sharing what he knows, he eventually feels isolated and lonely. To the extent that he has hurt others with his knowledge and technology—in whatever field and in whatever way—by cutting himself off from living relatedness with other human beings, he has cut off his own soul.”

The Innocent One

The Innocent One is the passive pole of the bi-polar shadow. A man possessed by the Innocent One shadow wants all the power, glory, and status that comes with harnessing the Magician archetype in his fullness, but he isn’t willing to put in the work or take on the responsibility that said power, glory, and status requires. They see another man doing something really cool, and decide they want to do it too. These are guys who get super excited about a new hobby, or faith, or career path–their excitement is absolutely coursing through them–but after the easy part has passed (coming up with the name of the band, buying a skateboard, designing the start-up’s logo), they realize how much “dead work” is required to get really good at the cool thing, and they give up.  Men haunted by the shadow of the Innocent One want to be millionaires, but aren’t willing to toil and work years to achieve it. They want to play guitar like Django Reinhardt, but they give up guitar lessons after just a few weeks. They want to be spiritual, but without all that prayer, meditation, and scripture study business.

But the Innocent One’s shadow behavior doesn’t stop there. Because a man in touch with the Innocent One can never attain or achieve his goals because of laziness, he doesn’t want others to achieve their goals and ambitions either. He becomes a stumbling block to others simply out of envy. A man possessed by the Innocent One begrudges the success of others and does all that he can to diminish it. Theodore Roosevelt despised this type of man. To him, a man possessed by the Innocent One was “one of those cold and timid souls, who know neither victory nor defeat.”"

This informs several interpretations.

Kresten's commitment to the former is not merely translucent but transparent; he is Saruman Incarnate. Only profound narcissism could have doomed him to this fate, for he certainly had the intellect necessary to identify the trend and to transcend it. He simply lacked the motivation; the Fate of the World, at home and a broad, was not sufficient.

Alanna's attachment to her own intellect was projected upon this Manipulative Animus, so much so that it could only reinforce those attributes that led to her untimely and tragic downfall.

No man would forgive this sort of Black Magik.

Andrew is a little harder to spot, but it does not take long to identify self-entitled, uninvolved histrionic attributes in the live-and-let-live Virgo Male. His development of the Lover archetype was precisely at the root of his spiritual laziness and academic setbacks, as well as the haze of unfeeling cynicism and collegiate dismissiveness that followed it, a pale imitation of his turned-on intellectual curiosity and altruistic fervour. He is the Innocent One in the most nauseating ways.

The Dream of the Green Jew:

The first part of the dream recounts the intoxication of infatuation. Having become victorious in Love, the protagonist returns home, only to fall asleep at the wheel. (It does not take a Driving License nor even a thorough knowledge of the dreamer's skills in driving to read the ominous portents herein.)

When he awakes, he finds himself within the house of his lover's father. Callous in his methods, the protagonist enters into debt with the father; this is not unlike an unpaid dowry. Forced to confront the realities of enduring patriarchal tradition, he takes his leave of the establishment, but not before his vehicle of love has been broken down.

A slice of pizza (a piece of the Mandala) indicates that he has however salvaged a slice of his personality from that adventure: the Lover Archetype. I would not be surprised to discover that the pizza slice was shaped to be one quarter of a whole circle.

Valuable as it might be, it is alien to this new environment. Only an entire pizza would be a fit burnt offering.

As Andrew takes his leave of the confines, having discovered his means to be invalid, he finds his own father, without the building. Mitchell is coddling a childhood friend of Andrew, who discovers the fate that will befall him should he fail to attain his new goal: a perversion of masculinity that clings eternally to the Divine Child archetype. The perpetually "innocent" Andrew is doomed to the life of the Eternal Boy.

The following part of the dream revisits the childhood state. What starts in the driver's seat ends in the backseat: a position of dependency. Therein he confronts the Anima as it is transmuted into a vicious and confining, matriarchal force: the Spider Mother, but as an octopus instead of an arachnid. His parents, whose inflated egos obligated a young Freedman to prove himself perpetually, become the chief antagonists, for they oversee this bondage but do nothing to stop it. I can personally attest to this softness in their approach to parenting: severe expectations but abounding forgiveness, praising him as much for his sensitivity as for his success, even when the former acts against the latter, rather than in harmony with it.

Directly out of this overwhelming matriarchy emerged the most depraving patriarchy. Again Andrew found himself in the clutches of a daemon, and again he was within a confined space. This time, the innocent boy was robbed forcibly of his innocence by the entire force of patriarchal tradition, represented by a centipede (effectively: a karmic snake) whose every appendage was a phallus and a fallacy.

It is only in the last of the five acts that Andrew is offered a solution: the cultivation of his spirituality, his Becoming-a-Magician. It is precisely this task that he had, by his own eventual admission, allowed to fall by the wayside upon my last visit with him, when he was at his worst and most self-destructive and emasculated.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

R.G.