After After Virtue:

For a scholar who professes a belief in that an innovative society is the most effective one, Alasdair MacIntyre seems extremely resistant to innovation in the defence of his own work, standing by his breakthrough publication After Virtue for nearly forty years. While he contends that any credible counterargument would have already been presented to him by now, there is nothing within his ethic which precludes the possibility of being sheltered from the Truth.

The simplest means by which to prove him wrong is to describe Life in three parts: fitting in, standing up, and standing out. We start our metamorphosis by attempting to “fit into” an established social order, in spite of personal moral scruples, hoping that by doing so successfully we might appropriate an appreciation for its norms, thereby bridging the gap between the inner and the outer.

Yet what we find is that social life is intrinsically Absurd, so all such ventures are Sisyphean. In the process, we learn one of Life’s few known constants: that we must “Stand Up for Ourselves”. It is by acquiring this virtue, upon which all other virtues are contingent, that we are able to retain our dignity when we inevitably fail.

The Third Stage is a reintegration, but not, as in the case of a bildungsroman, into a Society, but rather into Ourselves. Recognizing that we shall never “fit in”, yet that we cannot escape, we learn to exist within a Society which contradicts us while retaining our dignity in the contradiction. It is because the only constancy available to us is in this act of standing up on behalf of ourselves and our own views that the Individual comes to take precedence over all illusions of status and social value. Because courage is always necessary, the conscience becomes a Universal.

The examples corroborating this narrative are so multifarious that I might fill an entire book of my own with them. Suffice it to say that, of the few men whom MacIntyre references who articulated this intuition, his scholarship misrepresents them. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, in spite of doctrinal differences, arrive at one and the same conclusion. Yet in spite of citing many of Nietzsche’s own favourite sources MacIntyre dismisses Nietzsche, and MacIntyre’s philosophy might be considered symptomatic of Nietzsche’s first stage with very brief intimations of the second. Regarding Kierkegaard, conversely, the kinship MacIntyre seems to feel with his fellow Christian is overshadowed by a dubious negligence of the finer points of Kierkegaard’s work, especially regarding the Knight of Pure Faith and the inevitable disparity between internal and external life.

Ultimately, MacIntyre’s philosophy is a doctrine of conformism. While he is effective in disarming certain forms of conformism, exposing them for what they are, such as political “protest”, (which is, after all, no more than an attempt to adapt the external to the internal) he also propagates and reinforces various modes of conformity which are even more disastrous, simply because adapting the internal to the external is even more barbaric and demoralizing. (Even George Lucas, another great modern student of mythology, intuits the authoritarian consequences of forcing people to agree in spite of partisan reservations.) Both responses are failures to live with the inherent contradiction between the internal and the external worlds, which Albert Camus called the Absurd and which Carl Jung established as the imperative for psychological individuation.

MacIntyre’s scholarship is fundamentally typical; he forgets Camus in favour of Sartre, just as he forgets Jung in favour of Freud, shamelessly identifying each individual only as representative of his respective group, for that reduction lies at the heart of MacIntyre’s sociology. In demonstrating an unwavering allegiance to the Analytical School, professing its blessings openly, he does not avail himself of the blessings of its opposing school(s), and it comes as small surprise that no convincing antitheses to his admittedly partisan presumptions have yet reached his desk.

 

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

Paradox:

Paradox.

Honestly: with all the time that I spend thinking, am I going to reprimand myself for a few conclusions that will eventually require revision? Categorically and imperatively (as well as definitionally): No. Because I know my intent, and nothing will either justify nor require me to waste energy reprimanding. As for a break from thought: I can dig that. Reprimanding is revision; that is all ready the beginning to think again. But I can reprimand those whom I know to mean ill. They are transparent to me. And this is no longer any relative matter. Even relativism was a step towards the teleological conclusion. It was a step in the proper direction, surely. Hence it was all ready an expression then of that peak from whence I speak now. And I do not delude myself into believing that all beings are intrinsically inclined to make this climb. I will help those on their path. I will annihilate those who would slow the ascent. They may get behind me.

Dm.A.A.

La Máscara del Diablo:

The Devil’s Mask:

The essential nature of evil is that it is ambivalent to human suffering. The agent of evil does not necessarily go out of its WAY to do harm; it simply allows harm to happen. Thus the hallmark of the Devil is neither aggression nor passion, but rather Apathy and Detachment. Evil brags of being remote from the consequences of its actions, and in its condemnation of those who must contend with it to set these matters right it is ruthless. Once it is met with its own ruthlessness in retaliation, it only mocks its victims by mirroring them. Hence the Devil is traditionally depicted as neither an aggressor (in the sense that political propaganda depicts opponents of its paradigm) nor a passionate and spited lover (as tends to be the media depiction of stalkers, rapists, and other people who are in romantic want). The Devil, in all known classics, is sly, and his slight is characterized by a CALCULATED apathy that misappropriates importance to things which are not intrinsically important. Hence: the Devil lives in the Details, and he is associated closely with pettiness, but not mere pettiness so much as one that makes matters of colossal consequence and import APPEAR petty. The righteous man is only calm when all is well; the Devil is calm, regardless. The nature of the trick is to persuade the docile mind that in fact good and evil are relative, by confining the distinction to a strictly personal view. But an Interpersonal View such as that which is provided by positive Religious Experience will demonstrate that in fact Harmony is a Moral Universal; any system in the Universe is either ALIGNED with God, or it is out of alignment. And all forms of pain are symptoms, even if they are necessary towards Godly ends, of misalignment. The aforementioned necessity itself draws its painful quality from the problem it aspires to resolve.

Dm.A.A.

APOLOGETIC PSYCHOLOGY: The A.B.C’s of How to Accept Being a Criminal.

APOLOGETIC PSYCHOLOGY: The A.B.C’s of How to Accept Being a Criminal.

As far as I can recall, being in the right had nothing ever to do with following the group. Whenever any group of people were given freedom, they would usually decide matters by a vote that often had little if anything to do with the moral and legal dictates put upon them by their elders and superiors. And this sort of collective deviance found its justification in the systematic criticism, by the group, of those same elders and superiors. A popular motif was of course hypocrisy: Supposing that the superiors themselves were possessed of inferior virtue? Obviously, if we only valued the Law insofar as it served US, and we observed it only out of fear of personal disadvantage, then any authority in a position of sufficient power would have not only the ability but the motive to abuse it. Did this justify the mob of miscreants that were my peers? Veritably, no: because however sketchy the execution of the Law was, its Value was what sold it for me. It was simply a matter of maturity that I came to realize that the Value of the Commodity (the Law) was less than the set of Values that it was advertised and sold for.

The Group persisted, up through high school and into several generations that I witnessed of college students. I can only presume (and in most cases have no choice but to confess) that the tendency for group hypocrisy survives in many people up through old age and even gets in bed with the extremely elderly and infirm on his or her death-bed. At that point, when one has little left to lose, what does the Law amount to, really? It can only hold as much value as the Values that it was meant to represent, and only if those Values are convincing. Obviously, as a human being who craves solidarity with other humans, I can only ultimately stake my well-being on Values which are Universal, such as Love, Compassion, Generosity, Friendship, and Loyalty. Even the principle of Individuality, according to which I retain the felt right to forego all other values in pursuit of my own, is a Universal Principle; most of us at least would DREAM of doing so successfully. That would be a Life worth living and dying for. And that is a Value the likes of which one takes gladly to the grave.

It has become fashionable to speak of “Criminal Psychology”. Like so many dangerous memes, it has even become the ominous title of a Course of Study offered at most Colleges and Universities. The term is ironical, because it implies that Criminals are in some pivotal ways different from Civilians in their very Psyches. Of course, several alarms flair off in my own, private police station (wherein some of the greatest Western minds are my own personal Deputy sheriffs) upon the contemplation of this concept.

1.    The distinction between “Criminal” and “Civilian” is purely semantic. It is a strictly verbal device used by a system in order to categorize people, arguably with the intent of Control. (Foucault.)

2.    It passes judgment upon the SOULS (Psyches) of individuals who violate a set of often arbitrary social dictates. (Nietzsche.)

But those are just the Common Sense triggers. What looms most ominous is of course in the Depths: how are criminals psychically different from civilians?

3.    Criminals are only psychologically different if they exist beyond the Fourth Stage of Moral Development (above the Law) or prior to it (below the Law). [Kohlberg.]

Of course, Kohlberg all so famously posited that MOST individuals operated at the THIRD stage of Development, just one step PRIOR (and therefore BELOW) the Law. Does this mean that most people are criminals? At some point, perhaps this was not the case, because Laws were so simple and basic that only Social Deviants would break them. But nowadays, when it is a mark of genius to know enough Law to hold up in Court, it is not unlikely that you, too, are a criminal. But then: I do not doubt that of most of my readers.

Even if not, so what? If you happen to follow the Law without KNOWING it, even to the extent that your average member of the Fourth Rung does, (which still rests, demonstrably, below most lawyers, who must by necessity operate on the fifth rung if they are to exploit loopholes in the service of their paying clients) it is not because you hold a set of VALUES but rather that you are so AVERAGE in your self-interest that the Law accommodates you. Enter again the classic group dynamics I discussed, which followed us like a long and stalking morning shadow since we were in kindergarten or even daycare. Why does the Law serve those who live BELOW it and ignore and marginalize those who live ABOVE it? Put simply: it was inherited by the Group. That’s right: the same kids who got together to prank the school by tossing peanut butter at the ceilings, or who sprayed their names on the ceilings of their respective restrooms, or who smoked, drank, and fucked in the Hotels and blamed the “snitch” who turned them in during one of her panic attacks: those are the people who help write our laws.

I know what you are thinking: what got lost in translation?

Well, as it turns out, kids remember what hypocrites their elders were, and they carry on the tradition by force of usually unconscious habit. So you get to college age and you learn how to USE and even TWIST the Law IN YOUR FAVOUR. And of course this is easiest to DO in a GROUP because a Group possesses the capacity to punish social deviance. As I have said many times before, a mob of people working in unison is capable of more EVIL than any one individual could ever dream of. They simply have a capacity that is greater than the sum of the group’s parts, which is all ready, by the nature of being multiple, greater than any one person.

So I repeat what I opened this essay with, in different words: as far as I can remember, doing the Right Thing had less to do with following the GROUP and more to do with following one’s HEART. For in a world of chaos and hypocrisy one can at least confess that the SPIRIT of the Law is good. We would like IDEALLY to operate in a world of mutual solidarity, compassion, and self-respect. And even if that is a bit too much to ask of OTHER PEOPLE, one can at least rise up above the Mass of Hypocrites and demonstrate those cardinal virtues in one’s own behavior, with one’s own self and conscience as witness. And insofar as this necessitates a certain degree of elitism in order to be effective in a degenerate age, this renders one’s own SELF one’s only true jury of peers, for one would be peerless save for the company of other deviants, who have often their own paths to follow.

So I repeat the obvious: How I feel is my only moral imperative. What others feels is no concern of mine. The only reason why your conscience should contradict mine to any effect would be if yours were more effective in serving the Universal Principles that rules and regulations were supposed to represent. And this is all but impossible, owing to two salient facts:

1.    Universal Principles are Universal. That means that, in theory, at least, any individual who is growing morally will inevitably arrive at the same fundamental conclusions over a long enough period of time, and upon arrival he will be in the company of an elite society of individuals who would all agree with him at any turn, for both his predicament and the course of action that he deems proper to take in such a predicament would be ubiquitous and unassailable.

2.    Universal Principles are Unenforceable. You can’t legislate love, police friendship, or find a loophole in loyalty. You can only take action against violations of these principles AS AN INDIVIDUAL, and beyond that your extremity is God’s Opportunity, and no mortal’s.

By saying “how I feel” to be my only imperative, I am not advocating for emotivism. Feelings ought to be informed by Reason; the development of an Individual requires certain irrational Feelings to be Refined and Transmuted. But I repeat this: that there will be no Law higher than Conscience. This does not mean that I confine myself to my own actions. On the contrary, Universal Thinking is binding upon Others because outside of the Law disappear the boundaries that isolate people. As Foucault pointed out, the Individual is in many cases a product of Power Structures. But I maintain that there is an OTHER Individuality, expressed as the Jungian Self, and distinct from what Jung called the “social unit”, who is capable of imposing Moral Order upon his surroundings. This would of course be compromising to both tyrants and parasites on both sides of the Law. The Law was only ever the formalization of Groupthink, which by its very design was a simply rudimentary way to defy arbitrary authority and to carry on a hypocritical tradition. To be GOOD has nothing to DO with following the Law; in fact, to the extent that one FORGETS THE LAW TO EXIST, except when it serves a MORAL agenda, one is the very Height of Nobility.

Our Law is what forces us to confine our Wills to our Selves. Law dictates that we can have our own behavior policed, as well as serving the policing of our neighbours’ behaviours. But it robs us of the right to police our neighbor DIRECTLY when he violates a Principle that all of us SHOULD, by definition, hold Dear, because without it all Value and Meaning would dissolve, and Life would return to Nihilistic Chaos. Law is the very ANTITHESIS of the Moral Conscience and the well-being of that elusive entity that alone can wield it: the Individual. Law forbids us to take action against those who usurp our own progress and who attack the very foundations of Human Decency that Empathy and Evolution necessitate: Love, Trust, and Freedom. And Law can only serve its impersonal function so long as it serves those who live ABOVE it and can wield it effectively; it becomes Godless and Depraved when it works only to accommodate the hypocrites BELOW.

When the Law works only to serve those who were Lawless to begin with, and who threw the Values out with the Product, the System of Law produces a breeding ground for the polar opposite of Empathy: Narcissism. The human parasite finds a nook and cranny in every legal loophole. He works as a multiple agent at every stage of Moral Development, belonging all the while, at heart, to only the most base stages that degenerates and infants alone call Home. As the Officer of the Law foregoes his own free thought to equate “Legal” with “Righteous”, his close friend the con artist thrives in that gray area that, by the very nature of the Law, the Law itself cannot oversee, for the Law is a series of Restrictions placed upon the MIND, and only an infinite Mind that is unimpinged upon by these Restrictions can fathom things like Love, Loyalty, Friendship, and Empathy. A machine can be a citizen, but it cannot be a Good Human Being. All of the devices of the Human Intellect fall short of drawing a map of the Human Heart, for the Human Heart yearns above all else to be undefined and, as such, Free.

When a wrong is committed against the Heart, it is Felt for a long time. A restriction is placed upon the Heart’s expression that the Heart must work with. In the process, the Mind must itself exercise restrictions upon the Oppressor that restricted it. Yet it will only appear identical to its Oppressor in the eyes of the Blind Law Man who, BY HIS VERY NATURE, cannot SEE the Heart, for it belongs to that Nebulous Realm that no Law or Restriction can touch, so that only its expression – its Manifestation in the World – can be restrained. And this alone is enough for the Heart, which craves confirmation in the World, to suffer inestimably, even infinitely, for it is on such a dimension that the affront is registered: in the Infinite. Thus what would have been Heaven becomes Hell, and all because Heaven on Earth was lost to Hell on Earth. Karl Popper might argue that the former is futile because it only produces the latter. But in fact the former is essential to the survival of the Heart; the latter is homicidal to impose and suicidal to accept.

Neither the con artist nor his friend the Law Officer avails himself of those Values which protect, avenge, and heal the Heart. This has been condemned to the province of religion. Cancer protects. Scorpio avenges. Pisces heals. The remaining nine prepare each of the water signs for its sacred task. Even in the realm of Western Astrology, however, this task is submerged underwater and the signs are dispossessed of their “constraining” duty and turned, by the very nature of the false freedom IMPOSED UPON THEM, into a priori suspects of manipulation, cruelty, and weakness. And some even yield to these temptations and use their God-given natures as justification!!!

The Officer protects the con artist as well as the Group that most empowers him. The con artist claims to protect both Group and Law, but he does so only to the extent that it serves himself, even if he does so at the expense of not only the Moral Universals but all so the Moral Universalist who is then framed and made to look like a con artist because he is found out to be a Criminal.

This is why Mike Ehrmentraut says to Price: “I didn’t say you were a bad guy. I said you were a criminal.” Being Good and Evil OUGHT TO, by its Nature, be our Main Concern. The Law is a mere FOOTNOTE IN that, and the psychology of the Criminal is simply one of two:

1.    Those who exploit the system for personal gain, narcissistically.

2.    Those who regard the system as just an other immoral and amoral obstacle to Goodness, empathically.

The former live below the Law. The latter live above it. And the Law serves, by its VERY NATURE, the former.

So if you had to decide to be a criminal or a civilian, which would YOU choose?

Dm.A.A.

SPOILER WARNING: The Last Jedi. A Work of Unsettling Postmodernity. Written by the Last Jedi.

Bill Moyers, in what I remember as an interview with George Lucas on the Mythology of Star Wars, pointed out that part of what made George Lucas' modern myth great was that it "resolved our moral ambiguities". The good guys were the good guys, and the bad guys were the bad guys.

One cannot help but to wonder, therefore: is The Last Jedi demoralizing? To be honest: I found J.J. Abrams' The Force Awakens to be sort of laughable and inauthentic, and I was all ready disappointed by the death of the hitherto immortal Han Solo. (Though apparently this was the way that Harrison Ford had wanted his character to go in Return of the Jedi.) But then my sister told me about how the recent films were modeled after the sort of story arc that "worked" for the original trilogy. And though she had not seen the originals, I could not help but to believe her. I remembered Mother watching Episode IV for the first time last year, and how for long thereafter she would recount her boredom at watching C3PO and R2-D2 walking through miles of desert for hours. So I must have wondered if perhaps I would have had the same experience watching Star Wars for the first time had I been around in the nineteen-eighties, save for my tendency to compare the recent movies to the originals.

This generous sentiment lingers to mitigate my feelings of existential angst and social anomie as I sit down (effectively, BREAKING down) to vent my aches and pains about The Last Jedi. At least it is endearing to be able to tell my sister about The Empire Strikes Back and how it, too, was what Dante from Clerks called a "downer ending", reflecting on my own feelings upon first seeing it and wondering what moviegoers would have felt upon discovery of Darth Vader being Luke's Dark Father.

What disappointed me this time around, and what I found demoralizing, was that the film seemed intent upon dissolving and deconstructing the Heroic Individual. This is a pardonable offense if it is interpreted to mirror the existential angst that Luke Skywalker felt in discovering that his Father was one of the most ruthless dictators in the entire Galaxy. However, taken by itself it feels tragic. The process begins with an older Luke who has turned away from the ways of the Jedi, predictably, after having realized that his own good intent could produce disastrous consequences. The heroine of the series consoles him, insisting that the failure was not Luke's own but rather that of his pupil, Kylo Ren. By asserting the Power of Intent, Rey asserts likewise the fact that we cannot control the CONSEQUENCES of our actions, and as such is the case we are not responsible for them. But by then it is too late: she has all ready been tricked by Kylo Ren's master, the diabolical Sith Lord Snoke. When she finally catches up to Kylo, intent on converting him to the Good Side of the Force, and in so doing bringing to life what appears to be the dying legacy of Luke, the jaded cynic who has turned on the ideal of heroism and honour, (as have an alarming number of contemporary viewers) she is relieved to find that Kylo is willing to betray his own Dark Master. But Kylo's fundamental ethos has not changed since when Rey communicated with him telepathically under Snoke's secret supervision. Kylo remains an aggressor to Rey, who refuses to join him as Empress of the Galaxy. The tragedy of Anakin and Padme is repeated, but in place of a classic tragedy is a post-modern deconstruction of the Internal Battle of Good and Evil. The first two Star Wars trilogies dealt primarily with this INTERNAL, RELIGIOUS conflict betwixt what is described in Judeo-Christian religion as the Yetzer Hatov and the Yetzer Hara: The Godly Impulse and the Wayward Impulse. The audience cheers for Kylo Ren when he seems to have turned against Snoke's predictions, using his Master's trust against him. But this seemingly beneficent treachery, an homage to Vader's betrayal of Palpatine in Return of the Jedi, only portends a new boss more grievous than the old boss. Kylo proceeds to betray the trust of the one person that he cares about: Rey. Rey stakes everything that she believes in in one last Hope outside of herself: that Kylo Ren can win an Internal Victory that will then serve the purposes of her Political Party. But when Kylo reveals that he was simply trying to attain a state of Absolute Independence and Power, this Hope is crushed, and Rey is left up to her own devices again.

The real tragedy for me was Po's power struggle with Leia Organa. Po opens the film with a feat of daring that defies even the authority of his own allies. As Albus Dumbledore said: it takes bravery to stand up to one's enemies, but the mark of true courage is to stand up to one's friends. Po is Chaotic Good, a reminder that what the Resistance is RESISTING is not just some out-group but rather the very Hegemony that they must be careful not to become (a carefulness in principle that can only be attained by carelessness at times in action). Po is the Individual who is living proof that the Resistance is superior to the First Order, not because it says so, but because its Cultural Superiority is established through the provisions it makes for the INDIVIDUAL, who is, after all, the Hero of the Hero's Quest. George Lucas' mentor Joseph Campbell could not stress enough that the Adventure of the Hero was an INDIVIDUAL QUEST, and in dialogue with Bill Moyers Joseph insisted that the ideal was to strike a Balance between Self and Other. This is mirrored in Lucas' notion of restoring Balance to the Force. This is all so why scholars who identify with Luke Skywalker in the original trilogy (one of whom I shall cite here anonymously, though I will point out that she is a woman, and that his character is not exclusively appealing to men as a role model) celebrate the fact that he finds his OWN WAY, independent of the warnings of Master Yoda nor of the temptations of Lord Vader.

Po's victory is a spiritual one. Star Wars was all ways intended to celebrate the Individual Conscience and to affirm the Superiority of the Human Heart to an impersonal system that governs a narrow-minded and mechanical intellect. Every private victory is mirrored in a public success, so the war is only a metaphor for one's own inner struggle for Peace and Balance. So why is it that viewers, my sister included, view Po's decision to disobey orders as a mistake? The consequences do not matter; he did what he HAD TO DO, in his unique position, from his informed point of view, deontologically and logically. His courage was a success in terms of Heart, but not in terms of statistics and probabilities*; its consequence, amidst various casualties that Po regards as not only necessary but noble, is that the First Order is able to track the Resistance Ship through Light Speed, a technological development that encroaches on Po's common sense because it is unprecedented and theoretically impossible. If Leia Organa had retained her heroic instincts, she would have rewarded Po for doing as her brother would have, as Luke had turned off his targeting computer in the first Star Wars film and won the hearts of generations by eye-balling the shot that was the fatal blow to the Death Star.

*"Never tell me the odds!!" quoth famously Han Solo. Thankfully Po still retains some of that spunk in dealing with C3-Po towards the end of the film, suggesting Hope for even (someone like) ME.

Po is not rewarded. He is demoted, and in the wake of a tragic surprise attack by the First Order he is put under the charge of a diplomat, who all so happens to be a woman. This is reflected in her military strategy; unlike Rey, who is a true Individualist in her uncompromising(ly) tomboyish nature, Leia's appointed official reflects every thing that Leia retains: tact at the expense of action and civility instead of courage in the face of Evil. She is the very embodiment of the Libran virtues as opposed to the Arian virtues that both Po and Rey exhibited in the first film of the New Trilogy and for which they are punished in this most recent installment. There is a certain vanity to her dismissal of Po, and whilst it seems endearing, charming, and relatable, it evidences this tragic fact: that Leia Organa, the archetypal fighting heroine, has become a bureaucrat. Even when the woman that she has appointed sacrifices her own life, it feels more like an act of narcissistic martyrdom than an act of relatable and egalitarian heroism*. Po's Bane is a sort of deus ex machina by virtue of which Leia is able to survive (even as her actress, the legendary Carrie Fisher, dies) and yet all that she represents now may be enthroned in vainglorious self-destruction.

*Even my beloved sister, who is all so a Libra, regarded this character whose name escapes me as unimportant. So I guess it's good the character's dead now. And I shall never apologize, on my Authority as the Viewer, for forgetting her name. We forget characters because they suck. Apologizing for that is like reprimanding your fellow diners for not tipping at a restaurant, even when all present are themselves employees who work in food service. It is like saying that servers must stick together instead of celebrating their time off as customers, FOR WHOM the Service exists in the first place.

Po redeems himself when he dispossesses his superiors of their treasonous authority. But when Leia comes to save him, it is ostensibly from himself. He is told that there was a Plan at work here of which he had had no knowledge, as though his heroism in the past has not earned him the Right to Know. He is then expected, for the good of his own cause, to sit still and let his superiors work out what needs to be worked out. But then the Plan is faced with imminent failure as the result of a covert operation that Po had set into play without formal permission. Again, the force of Chaotic Good fails from a consequentialist perspective despite all its nobility from a deontological and spiritual perspective. Fin and his new Asian girlfriend fail to locate a code-breaker that could do what Star Wars was all ways meant to do: to sabotage the Enemy from the INSIDE*. Instead, they are broken out of prison by an amoral con artist portrayed by Benicio del Toro, whose amorality is NOT consummated in an act of heroism (as would have been the case with Han Solo) but rather by an act of BETRAYAL more chilling than what Lando did in Episode V.

*It is only in this way that the Metaphor is complete, and prior to seeing the film I would rave over the fact that every preceding Star Wars film used the metaphor of INFILTRATION: Bringing down Power from Within the System. It is in this way too that I have been able to justify my involvement in the evils of Society, including the Internet, with the intent of redeeming it from those same evils. This principle was all so what Campbell's friend Alan Watts, the Zen Scholar, called his philosophy of Judo.

Po is made to look like the TRUE traitor when he is told that the internal condition of "feeling like a hero" is somehow DIFFERENT from doing one's social duty of "protecting the light". And at this point the film ceases to be simple and heartfelt. It becomes complicated and intellectual for all except for those audiences for whom conformity to a social order has become second nature. The Hero is stripped of his Title, and it is not long before we see again (in fact, in the very next scene) the First Order's most laughable bureaucrat, whom Po had mocked directly and had nicknamed "Hugs" at the tstart of the film. At first a classic counterpoint to the Forces of Goodness, Hugs is now a reflection of what they have become. Po has become Hugs, told that his Innermost Feelings do not really matter and that he is only of value insofar as he complies with authority. He is not strangled by Leia, but forced to endure a worse humiliation: demoralization. And so does the conscientious objector in the audience for whom the film ceases to be a metaphorical war representative of the Inner Quest and becomes instead a neo-liberal representation of War in its Actuality. The film becomes propaganda. Its message becomes collective rather than Individual. Instead of saying, as Rey does, that intent is all that matters and the Heart is the only authority in an otherwise SEEMINGLY impersonal Universe that is ACTUALLY Personal and Alive, the film seems to be saying: the Group matters. Militarism matters. We might wonder: if heroes like Po are forced into humiliation all because their plans go awry, what makes us, as the Resistance, better than the First Order? Why even bother to RESIST them in the FIRST place? Our "Order" is no better. What little Po's friends manage to achieve in liberating animals they lose by hurting people. Even Benicio del Toro's amoral character has a point when he says: do not choose a side. He is at least an ABSURD hero, even if he proves a despicable one.

In the absence of a Conscientious Reason to Fight, all that remains is the pressure to be "one of us". And that renders not only the war but the artistic representation of the war Absurd. The audience is told to accept War as a Good to the EXTENT THAT it is neither risky (except when that risk is calculated by the Powers that Be) nor needlessly painful (such as when Po's friend, who nearly succeeds in an act of spontaneous martyrdom that would have made Po's superior's suicide look like a joke, is "saved" by his Asian Lover). It is neo-liberalism. It is a fable by which complacent people can accept the facts of living in a Military State. And it is toxic to the Individual. War is stripped of all Individual Valour that might calm the conscience, but it continues to be rationalized by bureaucratic agendas and internal power struggles that will tear the Good Guys apart from the inside only if Star Wars stays true to the original format that it seems to be aiming to honour.

Po and Rey remain the only heroes who are not traitors in some fashion, and they are made to bear the burden of the REAL traitors. Was Po not betrayed when Leia kept her plans secret from him? Was Rey not betrayed by Kylo Ren? Even FIN was about to desert and by so doing to betray the Asian girl, who ends up betraying the ENTIRE RESISTANCE by saving Fin. AND SHE GETS AWAY WITH IT. She might even live to have died a martyr, for she would have died fighting not to destroy what she hates but to save whom she loves. She does not want to pay the price of one for the other, yet she gets the credit in Leia's eyes. Even Luke Skywalker dies nobly FROM A DISTANCE, tricking Kylo Ren into thinking that Luke is pulling an old Obi-Wan Kenobi trick, when Luke really does not have the guts to do so.

All Conscientious Virtue is made to look like vainglory, as though Pride even in Death were the End in and Of Itself and not simply the Reward, by virtue of which one knows that a Just World has been established. In the past, we knew that we would be rewarded by Princess Leia for our valour. She did more as a Love Object and a Damsel in Distress than she could ever do as a Commander. In Power, Leia Organa is corrupted, though subtly enough to stay in power by people who falsely believe themselves to be free. In Love, she is deified. Even as a Warrior Priestess she remains Romantic, fighting alongside Han Solo, the force of Chaotic Good. But now this hard-nosed divorcee rides out the wave of praise that her brother is too DAMNED humble to accept. And he betrays us too, for he turns his own humility into vanity by turning on the Force Itself. He KNOWS that there is more to the Force than either the Jedi or the Sith, and he ADMITS that it is vanity to think otherwise. But he STILL TURNS AWAY FROM THE FORCE, until Rey convinces him to turn back.

The effect is a downer ending: dissonance demanding reconciliation. Snoke is dead, and with him dies the promise of resolution internally. We have only to look to Rey and Po now to save us. But even if the Resistance wins, so what? The only reason that we must not stop here is because we would become savages. Luke and Han were not TRYING to become Heroes. They simply DID, and they were rewarded. Even the conscious pursuit of that reward is worth fighting for. At least one remains loyal, unlike Benicio del Toro et al. My generation of Star Wars geeks learned from Star Wars that good things would come for EVERYONE if we followed our hearts, and that would include ourselves. Han survives to marry Leia. Luke becomes a Jedi. Everyone celebrates and there's a big feast. Balance is restored both Outwardly AND Inwardly. One does not have to TRULY sacrifice one's Self; one lives forever in the Force. And what greater incentive could exist then for a man to risk his illusory Life?

Lucas' vision was a Buddhistic one. But Disney has turned us against our Buddha Nature with this most recent trilogy. It started when we found that Leia and Han had split over their son's treachery. It gets bad when that son KILLS Han Solo, bastardizing the noble fight that Luke had to wage against his OWN Father, whom Kylo reveres but only to serve his own egocentric aims. And now we are totally divorced from the Dharma and thrown into Absurdity where our only Hope is in assimilation with the very Evil that we were trying to eliminate.

The viewer who leaves this film without scruple will not plan ways to save his people. He will simply remain complacent and await the next imperative from whoever motivates him sufficiently. His pride will be in allegiance to a party engaged in a senseless conflict. He will never rise to the grandeur that Luke Skywalker found only in Solitude. Even Luke's Heroic Solitude, which had produced his ability to heal and to redeem his Dark Father, is made into a form of self-righteous hermitage. And worst of all is this: that the complacent viewer will have one more millennial reason to condemn people who seek JUSTICE as scapegoats for his own vainglory. Justice, if it is Total, is also Just to those who administer it. Han knows that; hence his character is not shy at all about accepting and even seeking rewards. But if Justice and Heroism could somehow be watered down and made to look like egoism, and if in place of the Human Heart one had to institute a Social Order, then how swiftly would we FORGET that the Hero fights not JUST for his OWN Justice, but for what is JUST for ALL, and so he fights for US as WELL. And WE DESERVE IT.

Why is this so important? To put it simply, War becomes Hell when it loses Meaning. If there is no Individual Life to save, which is in turn to save all other Individual Lives, then one fights only to participate in fighting. There are no sides, and Benicio del Toro's character is the only one who gets it. It is all determined by the highest bidder. And no one can attain a height greater than a bid. Even if you manage to crawl out and to find in Solitary Meditation that the War is POINTLESS, your voice in attempting to deliver this Truth to the Masses will be lost, over-shouted by the ongoing bidding.

But there is a way out still. And this I hope to see redeemed in the third part.

We must remember that INTENT IS ALL THAT MATTERS.
What sets Darth Vader's betrayal apart from Kylo Ren's betrayal? He did it OUT OF LOVE FOR HIS SON.
Leia lost that Love for Solo that can only be found in looking outwards at a Common Cause*. Perhaps that was why she and Solo had to split in the first place: A Mutually Broken Heart. A loss of Hope in all that they had meant to invest in their wayward son.
Now she only retains that superficial, erotic attraction to the very rogue that she condemns to humiliation. What is lost is the underlying RESPECT for the inalienable, indispensable, and inextricable ROLE that he must play.

*A Cause for which one has to be willing to take RISKS, that one might self-transcend. The contemporary Leia only PRETENDS to honour that Cause. The Fire has gone out, and she does not try to deny it towards the end of the film when she is ready to part with Hope Itself.

When Maria asked me if I liked it, I said that I did, but that I could not say that I had loved it. But before I specified that, I replied, with hesitation, that I had ENJOYED the film, and that I was still thinking about it. To be honest with you in a way I cannot all ways afford to be honest with my sister: I enjoyed the film, BUT I am still thinking about it. And the emphasis falls on "but" in place of "and", rather than "am" in place of "was". Though with equal irony I might point out that even at 4:20 A.M. I am STILL thinking about it, though we saw it starting at 7:30 P.M. of Last Year. Happy New Year's. And May the Force be With You. May the Force be With Us All, that we might not surrender our Individuality and Hearts to the Mass that is (and has all ways been) the Dark Side.

Dm.A.A.

MILLENNIUM FALCONS and MILLENNIAL PROBLEMS: Part One.

TECHNOLOGY GONE ROGUE:

The most popular film franchise to date is Star Wars, as will be evidenced soon by the premier of the most recent film in George Lucas’ saga. Yet despite the increasing prevalence of science fiction turning into Science Fact in the present day, it is alarming to note that many millennials* seem to have forgotten the underlying meaning of Star Wars. And yes: this is beyond interpretation.

*MicroSoft Word does not recognize this word.

The Star Wars saga begins aboard an Imperial Space Ship that has tracked down Princess Leia Organa en route to the Death Star. The Death Star is a device capable of annihilating an entire planet. Incidentally, the Death Star gets its name from the fact that it is a Space Station the SIZE and SHAPE of an entire planet, but devoid of life save for that which is IMPORTED to it.

Leia Organa, whose surname derives from the same root word as “organism”, “organ”, and “organic”, is taken captive by a hooded, wheezing menace by the name of Darth Vader, whose name means “Dark Father” in what I am told is some language of Nordic Descent (I could all ways check online, but I have a tendency to forget any thing that I did not really have to WORK for, as I’m sure you do as well.). The mechanical grim reaper, who is faceless and impersonal as he is terrifying, is secretly her OWN Dark Father, though she cannot know that, and he might yet be unaware, as is the Audience.

Before she is abducted, Leia sends two droids (robots, one of whom is an android and the other of whom is a beeping trash can) to deliver a message to whoever might hear it. They escape the vessel, breaking off from what is now a machine of destruction in the same manner as an amoeboid creature breaks off by phagocytosis**. Vader’s personnel consider following the escape pod, but they are told to withhold this maneuver by their superiors, because the pod does not contain life-forms. It DOES, however, unbeknownst to them, contain rogue technology, which becomes the two most recognizable robot fugitives in contemporary history, byfar outshining Johnny Five, Rick Deckard, and the Terminator.

**Word does not recognize THIS word, either.

The droids eventually, after wandering for an excruciatingly long time in the deserts of Tatooine***, find Luke Skywalker, an everyman with a big heart and dreams more grandiose than his prospects. The farmer turns out to be Leia’s brother, though he does not recognize her as any thing more than “beautiful” when he views her video recording. The droids prompt him to find Old Ben Kenobi, a reclusive sensei who is one of a minority of adherents to the ancient religion of the Jedi. The only other apparent Believer is Darth Vader Himself, who has turned to the Dark Side of the Force. What unfolds is a dynamic Battle between Good and Evil in a society that has lost all hope of Freedom, under the oppression of the Empire, and has thereby turned from its Spiritual Origins and resolved itself to cynical intellect and groveling before the sheer facts, both of life, (in the case of Luke’s working class parental units) militarism, (in the case of the Empire Itself and its adherents) and scientific skepticism (in the case of Han Solo, a con artist whose rugged, atheistic views are heavily skewed by his own self-interest and egoism). Obi-Wan becomes the bridge between Luke’s Ordinary World and the Extraordinary World, and even though the Greater World proves just as cynical as Luke’s uncle, and a lot more heartless, it becomes the stage for a dynamic battle between Decency and Indecency that involves magic and mystery. And laser swords.

***Again, Word fails.

Luke Skywalker becomes an archetypal Hero because the trilogy follows his studies to become a Jedi, representing Goodness, and he must CHOOSE whether to remain a Jedi or to become a Sith, representing the evil Dark Side that his Dark Father chose, a disciple of his Father’s Way, a product of his Father’s Generation and the Hell that it created, wherein most people live in Godless ennui and anomie, unknowing that they are being USED by malevolent forces that they are forbidden by force of habit to believe in.

George Lucas, when asked by Bill Moyers if he was creating a new myth, insisted that he was telling “an old myth in a new way”. The Taurus director said that mythology was how we pass down the “meat and potatoes of our society”, a metaphor commonly applied to the archetype of the Bull. He drew his inspiration from his own mentor, an Aries by the name of Joseph Campbell, one of the world’s leading experts on Comparative Mythology, who wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Drawing on the term “monomyth”, an idea invented by James Joyce, Campbell theorized that all stories had the same basic structure, and that in order to retain our Humanity in an age of exceedingly depersonalizing machinery we would have to apply these archetypal forms in the realm of Science Fiction.

Unfortunately, the message was muddled over time. Lucas’ Taurus tendencies became misinterpreted by the public as “greed”, and that cast doubt on the Spiritual Authenticity of the trilogy, reducing it to an entertainment franchise.

Yet I do not need to use statistics to prove that Star Wars remains a player in the Collective Imagination. Personally, I seldom dream in Star Wars colours, though that serves to prove that I have little bias more than it disproves my point; in fact, it demonstrates the clarity with which I can confirm my claim with the evidence that follows. The story is retold in Ratchet and Clank, an immensely popular game that recently celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of its release. Clank is a robot that is produced by a computer defect in a Plant that produces Warbots**** for Chairman Drek, a megalomaniacal C.E.O. who is building a new planet “for his people” (really for “cash, and lots of it.” Pardon the spoiler.) by destroying old ones. Clank, who intercepts an Infobot containing a formal warning, by Drek, of his plans, escapes his mindless siblings by commandeering a spaceship. He is shot down by his pursuants on the desert planet known as Veldin, where a struggling mechanic named Ratchet is trying to build a spaceship of his own, but discovers that he is missing a “crucial component”. When Ratchet witnesses the crash, he goes to investigate, finding Clank and pilfering him. Clank startles Ratchet by announcing his own presence, offering to help Ratchet in exchange for Ratchet’s help; Clank is able to start any ship he chooses, and Ratchet’s ship is just what Clank needs in order to head off Drek, since Drek’s Infobot contains coordinates to a planet that Drek was intending to threaten shortly prior to (if not during, or even after the fact of the) invasion. Just as Ratchet is presented with these two robots and the opportunity to avail themselves of their programming, a sort of modern equivalent of a “magical property” that “Animal Guides” possessed in ancient human lore, Clank’s pursuants land on Veldin, and a deal is made as Clank requested. Throughout the remainder of the game, Ratchet struggles to regard Clank as an equal and not as merely a means towards an end, owing to Ratchet’s mechanical eye. Meanwhile, Clank, who is in many ways more “human” than Ratchet (who also happens to be an anthropomorphic catlike thing called a Lombax*****, though that remains beside the point) tries to win Ratchet’s heart in saving the Solar System. Clank, like C3PO and R2D2, (the aforementioned android and trash can duo from Star Wars) is a machine that is a fluke, serving human purposes instead of simply carrying out mechanical functions.

And yes: the movie and the reboot, which molest this touching plot, completely destroy the story in all its nuance and character development. Though they still weren’t TOO bad; I guess that the creators decided they could mess it up as much as they wanted since you can’t beat the original any way.

 Dm.A.A.

A Narcissistic God: (Part One.)

A Narcissistic God: (Part One.)

THE TICK:

Anthony is a failure both personally and professionally. When I try to maintain a professional relationship with him, he makes every thing personal. When I try to maintain a PERSONAL relationship with him, he makes every thing AWFUL.

I am made to listen to his marital and extramarital WOES for hours, to the point that I must give advice that I am made to bear the blame for when he follows it. It is not as though I am simply being held accountable for an Example that *I* set, whose moral merit is measured only by its applicability to All Rational Beings (a group that I have since excluded Anthony from). Yes: it HELPS if I speak from experience, because otherwise I am accused of Hypocrisy even BEFORE the fact. But I am converted, not for the first time in my life, into a sort of unpaid psychologist.

What does he care about my OWN woes? Nothing. The Love of my Life has died this year, and he has expressed neither remorse nor apology. I do not strongly doubt it that he even KNEW that she had past away long before I did. But to cover his own tracks (for he had refused to cooperate with my EVERY attempt to save her, though he has not hesitated to take credit for her own attempts to save herself*) he has remained “mysteriously” silent on the matter of her Death, a Fate that, to his knowledge, I had spent two years of my Life making it my singular purpose to prevent at any cost to Self or Other.

*the reason underlying this tendency in Anthony is a desire to IMPRESS me, but for better or for worse this passion has burnt to its own Destruction, for Apathy instead can dispossess me of the constant stress of being held accountable to me.

There is of course the matter of competition. Whenever I expend colossal energy in completing a project, he seems to delight in bringing it to waste, though he masks this delight in “righteous indignation.” (May the record show that, UNLIKE Aldous Huxley, I employ this term in quotation marks not as an attack upon the Emotion Itself, of course, but upon those who PRETEND towards it and abuse it, often both at once.) If we both agree to write a screenplay and I write the first four acts (Seventy Pages, to be precise about this case) in two days, I am not REWARDED for my drive and commitment, but ACCUSED of “taking over”. When I SHARE GRACIOUSLY with him my [DEEPLY personal and revealing] memoirs, which took weeks of research into my Karmic Past in order to compile, I am immediately expected to read a short poem that he wrote about his neurotic ex-girlfriend. Before I even check my e-mail, he calls my house phone, not simply DEMANDING that I read the inconsequential tripe he sent, but BERATING me for not having all ready done so!

Keep in mind: I WOULD have all ready done so had he honoured a previous arrangement that he would update my Inbox daily with progress reports about our Project. But without any formal notice he canceled this arrangement, yet still seems to feel ENTITLED to my attentiveness. He makes no hesitation to demonstrate his envy for both my punctuality and my prolific nature, for when he RANDOMLY produces a TINY piece of text, (without either Professional Import nor Personal Depth) eager to impress me for fear of the consequences of his own foolishness, he plays the part of David taking on Goliath, bewailing the “Injustice” of the fact that I EXPECT him to read my memoirs.

I do not expect him to read them. He made it clear that he does not believe in Reincarnation. He does not believe in Psychics. He does not seem even to believe in Karma. (Lucky for him.) And when I tell him that Nicole believes in all these things, he dismisses this as an other Female Tendency, which, by the nature of its being-Female, is negligible in Male Conversation.

At the root of it is of course a failure to take responsibility for one’s own actions. Did I DEMAND that he read my memoirs? No. So why does he ACCUSE me of demanding? It is HE that is DEMANDING that I read his poetry, and IN THEORY this is no great request next to my own, except that in REALITY his EXPECTATION that I do so requires not ONLY that I check my e-mail ROUTINELY, remaining available and dispensable* within TWENTY-FOUR HOURS of the post. I must all so put up, during the DURATION of this routine, with no information whatsoever MOST of the time, just for the HOPE that every once in a while I will be graced with the presence of a short ejaculation about his Traumatized Tinder Girlfriend. And why should that be so URGENT that it would take precedence over my other affairs? Clearly: because he craves my APPROVAL for FEAR that he will have to bite his own bullet when his habitually compulsive decision-making ruins all of his worldly plans. If Approval is “won” (by coercive harassment if necessary and by manipulation inevitably) early on, then he need take NO fall for the failure, for *I* will have condoned it!!

*This I shall expound upon below.

I mentioned being “dispensable”. As though all of the Above were not enough, there is the matter of Keeping an Appointment. Most people who are flaky will at least apologize and make an attempt to reschedule as a means of saving face. Anthony is one of two people I know who do not do this. He might schedule a meeting a week in advance, yet upon the day of the meeting I discover, after making SEVERAL phone calls, if Memory Serves, (for such Memories are either lost in Angst or Repressed in Trauma) that it is the day of his youngest brother’s birthday. Clearly, one of several things happened:

a.   He forgot his own brother’s birthday when he made those plans.

a.   He forgot he made those plans, but upon being reminded he did not care.

b.   He remembered having made those plans, but he still did not care enough to tell me.

b.   He deliberately made those plans to coincide with a day when he would have had the opportunity to flake. Because:

a.   He wanted an “easy out” free of accountability, should he come to prefer his family’s company to mine.

b.   He intended to stand me up, deliberately, just to spite me.

The List of Sins goes on. When he misses a deadline that he sets for himself, he takes his anger out on me. If I am kind to him, then he calls my masculinity into question, as well as my intentions, even though the worst of ulterior motives that he might produce as an accusation are in fact my DUTIES as a PRODUCER and COLLABORATOR, beyond which I never agreed to any other sort of sentimental attachment, but was of course coerced into it by force of illusory necessity. If I am UNKIND to him, he calls my Sanity into question, as well as his own Safety.

This is the man who threatens to crash the car under a highway bridge when he is “angered” by me. The anger is foretold by his dreams wherein he slaughters black people with machine guns. I appear within these dreams, as well. Naturally.

There is no in-between for Anthony. Either I am “too nice” or “dangerous”. His God neither protects the meek (except when it is him) or rewards the Bold (except when it is him behind the wheel). His God leaves it up to ANTHONY to house the meek rape victim who CONVENIENTLY happens to be a nymphomaniac girlfriend of his. His God puts ANTHONY in charge of sorting out Justice and assessing the distinction between TRUE masculinity and patriarchy, such as when Anthony calls my house repeatedly DEMANDING that I continue to house Micaiah, after I’ve all ready done so for the better part of a fortnight (two weeks) and Anthony, who has room for his nymphomaniac girlfriend, has no room to take in Micaiah for even one night. Is the inconvenience really his? Let’s not pretend that Anthony is not all ready sharing a bed with her. But at either rate, imagine the nerve he has to inconvenience ME. Some narcissist *I* must be to refuse!!

I’ve said there is no in-between with Anthony. Yet it is I that is made to look like the extremist. It is all ways, by his account, that *I* am too nice (falsely) or too dangerous (ridiculously). But this is only the measure of his own reaction to me. In truth, there is ALL ways a medium where I am concerned. I meet people halfway. They simply have to HOLD UP THEIR HALF. To Anthony’s mind, if he is running late and I bail to eat dinner, I am selfish. Never does it occur to him, apparently, that being PUNCTUAL is an end in and of itself, and failure to do so, no matter how grandiose the prospective rewards, takes precedence over the gamble. I am totally capable of remaining level-headed when all goes according to plan. If I MUST deal with insubordination, betrayal, and incompetence, then the very  nature of the SITUATION THAT HE HAS CREATED requires me to RESPOND, perhaps even to REACT. The simple act of HOLDING HIM ACCOUNTABLE is all ways, to Anthony’s mind, one of two extremes: a victory over me, or a loss. Either I am kind and he triumphs over me as the Aggressive Alpha Male, or I am unkind and he pretends towards meekness in Christianity.

And none of this is NEARLY as bad as Kresten Taylor.

THE TAPEWORM:

Most known parasites will drain your energy from OUTSIDE of you, but there are those rare breeds who* will eat you from the INSIDE.

*MicroSoft Word insists that I change “who” to “that”, but only because it does not recognize that some “people” are all so “breeds” of parasite.

Kresten Taylor leads a life perpetually lived at the expense of others. He perpetuates this by blaming his Hosts for their own “dependency” upon others, even when those same people who GRACIOUSLY Accommodate him despite his BLATANT narcissism do not themselves suffer from the same narcissism, but rather from BASIC HUMAN NEED.

Kresten is perpetually at war with the Other. Every victim that he has he turns into a victory. He claims emotions as though they were thrones. He has no ORDINARY human emotions, but only his envy and his boredom. The remaining emotions are mere acts used to sustain his lifestyle. And it all ways comes at the expense of others.

Tell me this, reader:

A young, virginal woman meets a young, virginal man in a Parking Garage at her University one Friday Night in February of 2015. They do not know one an other; he does not even attend her school. Within a month they are texting one an other about every thing imaginable. He has fallen in love.

Would a loving, just God not desire for them to consummate this love? Would He not render it mutual, that they might dispossess each other of their mutual celibacy? Is this not in fact the RATIONAL and SECULAR basis for the Christian Subversion of Premarital Sex, and if millennial college culture ever comes CLOSE to that Christian Ideal, would this not have been the best example?

As it turns out, such plans went awry. Because the young man all so had a parasitic “friend”, of five years, who was a drug addict. Sponsoring the parasite de facto, (for neither of them would dare to admit to it de jure) the virgin male invited his best friend to start a BAND with him. And knowing the love for Music that possesses the heart of his Light of Love, the virgin would not hesitate to invite her to their concert.

Within four days of meeting, Kresten Taylor and Alanna McLeod were witnessed by me, holding hands and strolling through my neighbourhood in rapture. Within the following month, they had sex five times. They all so took cocaine.

When I saw Alanna again, she was again a drug user, no longer a Virgin, and she was obsessed with a narcissist who had even neglected her on her own birthday. (For the record: I am sympathetic to birthdays. Hence I all ways plan my business meetings AROUND them, not DURING them.) His narcissistic tendencies had compelled her to dissolve their partnership, though it did not dispossess her of his influence. She insisted that she had no sexual attachment to him that he had stolen from me, even though I would have been more qualified to accommodate such a human attachment. In fact: she was now ASEXUAL, in part, of course (though I would come only later to deduce this, not having known the entire extent of their drug habits) owing to vasoconstriction from Cocaine use. The other part was the fact that she never reached orgasm under his supervision.

She was all so suicidal again. And unbeknownst to me: she blamed me for the break-up, though she struggled to admit it in any thing more than passive aggressive hints. This was because Kresten, claiming to feel GUILTY towards me, chose to cope with his guilt by IGNORING her, routinely. There is apparently no FUN in spending time with your cheap fuck* when you have to feel GUILTY about it. Ironically, he managed to aggravate the CAUSE for guilt by abusing the person whom I loved most, to the point that her Narcissistic Abuse Syndrome, coupled with the RAPE (for that is what college girls usually call sex under the influence of the notorious “aphrodisiac” cocaine) had aggravated her Suicidal Ideations, and even Tendencies. By FEIGNING Guilt, he had driven a wedge between me and my Love, for he implied by so doing that I WANTED her to suffer, and that leading her to suffer was a service of atonement to me.

*Alanna would have blamed ME for calling her that, precluding the possibility that I was speaking on behalf of someone I knew personally who betrayed me during one of my sentimental lapses in judgment. This sentimentality will account for the contradiction of knowing him and being betrayed by him nonetheless.

Once I had proven to her that I in fact DID hold her interests as my own, that “guilt” had mysteriously run its course. No longer willing to atone, and pretending himself blameless, the Tapeworm adopted ANGER as his modus operandi. No longer justified in my anger, ostensibly, I justified his own anger in self-defense. So Spite became a throne that the Conqueror Worm seized. When presented with the opportunity to re-form the band, with Alanna as the Band Leader, (for this was her one TRUE Heart’s Ambition) knowing that he had the opportunity to atone with me, for I had set aside my pride in making this a possibility, he said, unforgettably: “Why do I owe YOU music?” Knowing that personal responsibility mattered to me, he did not hesitate to tell me that I have “no responsibility for [my]self”. I stammered, in text, to mention BLAMELESSNESS – that I had remained not only ACCOUNTABLE but BLAMELESS, for I had served Alanna with ardour, and any verbal abuse that she might have accrued from me was justified by her OWN disrespect towards me (and fell under her own Dictate of Telling her the Truth, even if it meant Hurting Her). It was KRESTEN who had PRETENDED towards Blamelessness when, even at this very moment, he BETRAYED BOTH ME AND HER for a SECOND TIME. Having been once betrayed by him, I had not only the power but the RESPONSIBILITY to hold him accountable to her Needs in the manner that I would have held MYSELF accountable, and that I did, within the limits of the station assigned to me. I held myself accountable to my side of the story: the ONLY side, the Victim’s Side, and I broke with the unwritten pact of Secrecy only AFTER I heard that HIS side of the story was already infecting the ears of my former friends. Yet my account was dismissed as though it were SLANDER! He FAILED to provide for Alanna’s needs, on my watch, and he owed it to the BOTH of us that he atone, for that was WHAT HER LIFE DEPENDED ON, and HE HAD ENDANGERED IT. Music was not what he owed to us. Music did not BELONG to him. Music simply accommodated him at the expense of other people. Music was God’s Nectar, and SHE NEEDED IT TO HEAL. So naturally I made no attempt to point all this out to him. Even defending myself became pointless to a sociopath who did not see the IMMINENT DANGER TO MY LOVE, and to HIS LOVER, as a sufficient motivator.

Alanna had no choice but to confess that she had sinned. But even in admitting to a love for me that she had kept hidden for an entire year, she could not bear to see me, for her guilt – her TRUE guilt – was too great. I could not cast doubt upon this guilt. I knew it. It had manifested in displays of aggression that amounted to more than the narcissistic apathy nor the pragmatic anger that Kresten displayed. She felt Bad. And I could feel it in her presence. In his presence, I felt nothing but my own disgust. Neither did she mirror any guilt of MINE. INSIDE, I felt blameless. It was outside of me that I felt pain. The only pain that ate away at me from WITHIN was the betrayal of the Tapeworm.

A year apart did little good for us. Alanna finally caved in. She followed Kresten’s suit. She tried to kill the guilt inside herself: to abort it, so to speak. But she could not do what he did. Because he never DID it. He never FELT guilt. Only she did. He made it look so easy. Just forgive yourself! Jesus forgives you. And if Dmytri does not pardon you, he is not Jesus! (As though pardon and forgiveness were one and the same. I forgave her by default. But I could never pretend she had not wronged.)

Anthony told me earlier this year that she was talking to Kresten again. She broke her promise to me. I thought little of it. I imagined that she had her reasons. But I had to know for certain. So I contacted her. Shortly thereafter she threatened to sue me for “stalking”. When I called her bluff, she called the cops on me. Even the officers found it quite laughable. They tried to hide it well. But I know cops. These guys saw through it. She once told me that she did not care that “people” (Kresten and Anthony) thought little of me since I did not have a job or car. Now, Officer So-and-so read to me her report. Apparently I was “stalking” her without either a vehicle or reported source of income. Of course: I had a job at the time. But I had hardly the funds to take the Coaster down to wherever she lived, an address that I never got, though Kresten Did. But maybe she omitted the detail about the job. I don’t recall. All I recall is how transparent (and psychotic an appeal to status) was her attempt to make me Look Bad. It was childish. Even child-like. She was just a child.

She died later that year. I found her GoFundMe account months after her suicide. It was operated by her Mother. No one had told me. What I DO remember is this: that Anthony went to a Poker Night, up in TEMECULA, with his former room-mate, Mike Johnston. Kresten was in attendance at this function. He was with his new girlfriend. So much for mourning the loss of his previous one. But then: perhaps it was this very same relationship that caused Alanna to spiral out in Suicidal Jealousy, for a second time in her life, and only after she had severed ties with all her old and loyal friends. Oddly enough, guilt did not cause Kresten to IGNORE his new belle in the manner that he treated his old one. He was actually SEEN with her, and most likely on a regular basis. Perhaps his only reason for even hooking UP with Alanna was to get back at me for the fact that, five years ago, I dated Alexandra. Back then, he had had a whole MONTH in which time to make his feelings known. He, Alexandra, and I hung out regularly after school. And before then, he had known her for a YEAR. But instead he told me he USED to have a crush on her. And having KNOWN that this was once the case, for I knew Ally well and she knew Kresten even better, I supposed that he tried to tell me he’d moved on.

He never moved on. When I came to him and Tony, after she broke up with me, asking for help, he was the first person to threaten to call the Police on me. And certainly not the last.

I ask you THIS, reader:

Does a Just God desire this to be my Fate?

Is it worth the loss of a CHILD?

Dm.A.A.

HOW I WAS HOSPITALIZED:

I never told you how I was hospitalized. My ex was an E.S.F.P, I am certain. Her demeanour* was endearing to everyone she met; I don’t know if a single person suspected her Good Nature, even those girls which she berated and would call sluts, out of jealousy alone. (And hardly – if I must be defensive in writing this, for fear of accusations of hypocrisy – out of any sort of deliberate malevolence or betrayal the likes of which could lead to a tragic Death.) This was the girl that Kresten, an E.N.F.P, had a longstanding crush on, though he hid the fact deliberately out of cowardice rather than decency. Ally had had a few bad boyfriends. In addition, her father, a vulgar man who is probably a Republican, and who is definitely an Engineer, cheated on Ally’s beloved Mother. The father was probably an I.N.T.J. It is hard to ascertain.

*To this day, I write in British English customarily by force of the habit she instilled in me early on.

Ally broke up with me on a whim. She grew tired of my melancholy broodings. They were brought on by several factors. Despite seeing her frequently in Public, long before I confessed to my parents, three months into the relationship, that I was dating her, I seldom if EVER got a moment ALONE with her, and even then I felt like I was out in PUBLIC when I looked into her eyes. It was unnerving, as you can imagine. And that is not cowardice, but decency, speaking of course.

There were other personal shortcomings she had, of course. An E.N.T.P. I knew, whom I have mentioned to you on Rosh Hashanah, (the day you nearly died of glasserations) once said that she was the “wrong kind of Zen”,
and, next to “crazy bitch”, I regard this as not only HIS best description for her, but THE best. Kresten of course suspected Andrew’s motives for saying this, knowing how much the Nicholson Sisters DEPLORED Andrew for draining their energy. PERSONALLY: they had it coming. If you (the General You, in this case referring to her) are going to BROADCAST YOURSELF as some sort of healer or mental health guru, you better prepare for actually DOING THOSE THINGS. But it was All a Show to the E.S.F.P. As was our revered relationship.

She got the ending that she wanted. The creepy intellectual loner was out of her life for only Four Months before he came back to their Family Home, demanding an explanation. She certainly had no reserve of malice and conviction in saying “I BROKE UP with you.” But it was news to the loner. When she and I last saw one another, I was convinced that we were still On a Break. Somehow, the adolescent girl EXPECTED me to GET that It Was Over, and that She Was Happy. It would have been sweet, considering we spoke to one an other again upon the same High School bench where I first sat down to talk to her, “intimidating[ly]”. But I was not buying the cyclical narrative. So I promised to become a Better Person, intent upon Returning Someday.

When I did return, I held in my hands a box of poems I had written to her on coloured index cards. The box was an empty Sudoku box, if I am not mistaken. Her family was terrified. It was late night; I was on their porch, a porch that I’d come to call Home, for she and I had agreed that it would be my salvation from my backwards, cynical Parents. This was the House where six nights a week the Nicholson Sisters would spend away from the apartment of their “Awful” Father, a man I tended to take kindly to in spite of all the nonsense on both sides. This was their Mother’s Home, a luxurious two-story suburban house, the second story of which, I must specify with dramatic irony I learned in Literature Class and Life, I only saw once. (I think.)

The Mother was an E.S.F.J. I do not doubt it. She talked my ears off. She talked everybody’s ears off. What she SAID was what Shakespeare would call a “tale told by a fool”, because it was more or less a string of seemingly unrelated Events. So much for Zen! But perhaps that’s what Alexandra THOUGHT Zen was. Once I tried to engage Claudia Nicholson in some sort of actually MEANINGFUL discussion. She must have been rambling on for an hour or so. We were at Rubio’s. I had before me a black bean burrito, mostly untouched. I got about three sentences in when she just did that thing that E.S.F.J’s do after I have opened my mouth: she sort of nodded with passive aggression, that I could not tell if she was trying to HIDE her bewilderment and lack of interest, or if she was trying DELIBERATELY to convey to me that she did not care and that it was my fault that she did not. A fault, I might add, that she would Pardon Graciously, of course.

Where decisions were concerned, there was no question of Emotion ruling over Intellect. (I hope by now that I’ve established that Claudia was not an “intellectual” even in PRETENSE, and Alexandra only so.) Her decision-making was erratic and spontaneous. Once we visited a Shopping Mall and walked into one of those really teenage clothing stores; perhaps it was Urban Outfitters? She saw a shirt that seemed like Alexandra would wear it; it was a mess of hearts the likes of which you would see at Hot Topic in aesthetic: cartoony, girly and tomboyish all at once, and far from capable of being described in post-adolescent terms. The shirt read “Love”, or may be it read “Screw Love”. If the former was the case, Claudia delighted in berating it, using the opportunity to self-identify with the berating. If the latter was the case, she simply self-identified with the Shirt.

When I showed up at their home, a box of love notes in my hands, Claudia was convinced I had a gun. The following day, I think, which would most probably have been a Thursday, I got a call whilst at the home of a certain Austin Williams. Austin, who might forgive me for using his name, for he goes by an Alias now, is your prime example of I.N.T.J. He used to come up to me and Alexandra at Graziano’s Pizzeria and ask us if we wanted to hear his stories. I was a Literature Major, of course, so I humoured the hell out of him. Any humour Alexandra felt towards him [w]as surely at his own expense. And I don’t doubt he knew it.

The phone call was from my Mother, who was too embarrassed to admit who or what it was that came to visit, but I had to come home quickly. I rushed like a madman home, God only knows how many blocks, fearful that Claudia had called the Police. At the time, “restraining order” was the most nerve-racking thing I could fathom.

It was just Claudia and Neal Nicholson, together in a room again at last, intent on talking to me about the well-being of their daughter. He had to level with me and to tell me that Alexandra thought I was a Great Guy but that she did not want a Relationship. I contested. He then went on to tell me that “relationship” is a ubiquitous term. Even he and *I* have a relationship, apparently! But of course I wondered this much: if RELATIONSHIP is so ubiquitous, and I did not doubt that Alexandra still believed in the Over Soul, as I did, then how could she OPT OUT OF IT? And why was I no longer welcome in Their Home? I did not think she would give me false hope of escape. The term “self-entitlement” was not in my vocabulary. This much was all ways clear to me: any one who lets you into his or her world OWES you the Security. Any one whom YOU let in to YOURS, you owe it to that person as well. Why was I so melancholy, as of November, when a week apart and an essay by Sartre sent me back into my Depressive Ways? It was a sense of IMPOTENCE: that I could not PROVIDE FOR my Beloved. And the graver this sense grew, the more she came to agree with it. At LAST, however, I had found SALVATION! The works of Osho, the notorious E.N.F.P. guru who (though I’d not known it at the time) ordered the poisoning of people with Salmonella, (How is this guy NOT listed in black on that Personality Website??) had become MY guru, via the miracle of the Internet. As I [s]at around ratting with Ally’s folks, I all so had my index cards. I had to show them the contents of the box, apparently. And I had to demonstrate my use of CHI in balancing them. I was sure that these practitioners of Eastern Wisdom and Holistic Medicine would understand. Neil was a reader of Eckhart Tolle, and Claudia listened to Deepak Chopra!!

Of course: she all so worked at Aurora Behavioural Health. Shortly thereafter she arranged a Panera date with my Mother. Mother returned, HOURS later, ecstatic. NEVER BEFORE had she been in the presence of so WARM and ENTERTAINING of a Woman! Of course, it’s not like Mother got out much. My Mom, the Aries, is all so a highly closeted I.S.F.P. For her, E.S.F.J. is what E.N.F.J. is to ME. We become that under stress. And there was a LOT of stress going around at the time, surrounding me, as you might imagine.

Why did I do it?

Put simply: it made sense. THESE are my Six Words to Sum Up Life: It made sense at the time. And that will ALL ways be my Refuge and my Solace. I cannot be BLAMED for how OTHERS REACT. I have only my Conscience, my Actions, and those Few People who would Listen.

Alexandra and her parade of lovers entered into my Life – MY INNER SANCTUM – and CHANGED things. They stormed my conscience and turned everything upside-down. They made a fucking mess. And then, having left the stove on, and the cookies still in the oven, which was still only pre-HEATING, and should not have even HAD cookies IN it yet, they left my Conscience to Burn to the Ground, a nihilistic mess that I had warned them about with every last smoke-filled breath. So who showed up at WHOSE home, then? Who was the TRUE danger?

You don’t come into my Life and then just LEAVE, Nicole. And if that seems FRIGHTENING to you, it’s time to grow up. You AFFECT people. And people don’t owe you the COURTESY of COMPANY. YOU owe THEM the courtesy of MAKING that Company Pleasant and RELIABLE. In the words of Meth Head Number X from Breaking Bad: You don’t put thoughts in my head. If you just up and LEAVE, you have wasted my time. And I can’t have that: wasted time. You owe me for it. And if Society disagrees, then guess what? Fuck society. My rebellion is not adolescent. It is SOCIETY that is adolescent; there only ever IS the ILLUSION of a Social Order when one is BEING an adolescent. ADULTS don’t send friends and parents to tell LOVERS AND FRIENDS to leave them Alone. ADULTS TAKE RESPONSIBILITY.

So you’re a Child now. So be it. It’s a good coping mechanism. Take as much time as you need. But don’t think I am going to let you dictate how I ought or ought not to feel. I remain a Free Agent, and these feelings, if I am bound to them and them alone, are as much your children as they are mine. I will NOT be forced into denying this.

I tried for a LONG time to find that Zen Ideal that Alexandra preached so hypocritically. But just as I reached Total Detachment, I took a walk down the street I’ve lived on for this many years. There was a woman, in her forties or so, standing upon her driveway, outside of an Open Garage. She was crying, looking down at the bottom of the road, where the Big Trees are. You should remember. And I say “should” imperatively, not only in hope. I asked her, airily, what was wrong. She told me, choking up and fighting to WITHHOLD an out-burst, that it was hard to let her kids go. It must have been that time of the year.

That only happened to me once. I do believe that it was GOD that wanted me to see and to hear and to WITNESS that.

Huxley was wrong. God wants us to be ATTACHED to Life.

There is an Aries named Slavoj Zizek. I typed him long ago as an I.N.T.J. That makes two; Maynard James Keenan is the only other Arian Mastermind I can think of.

Slavoj said that English and French are the only two languages in the World that have the expression “to fall in Love”: “tomber l’amour”. He distinguished Christianity as a Religion of the FALL from Buddhism, a religion of Ascent.

I choose the Fall, Fitz.

I fell in love with you.

And in love I shall remain.

If you wish, you can sweep me up.

Dm.A.A.

Post-scriptum: Claudita, the youngest daughter, just graduated High School this year. Anthony (E.N.F.P.) and I saw the sisters enter Denny’s just as he an[d] I were ratting about My First Play and His Film Scripts. Alexandra is an Aspiring Screenwriter. At least: the Internet attests to this dream, conceived of during our “Relationship”, remaining alive.

The Weird Sisters sat down pretty much two tables behind us. Ally did this thing she does; she began to orate loudly. I did my best to talk over her; they sat BEHIND me, and I’d seen them enter FIRST, so it was none too hard.

But then Anthony did the thing HE does. He could not keep his EYES off of Ally, and he was grinning with authentic malice. I kept telling him to stop doing that. Finally I had to explain to him, with TRANSPARENCY, the importance of remaining Uninvolved from them. I guess that Detachment pays off, though it is only a Means and not an End (as Aldous Huxley should have pointed OUT in a book that he himself entitled “ENDS AND MEANS”).

I was not TOO mean. But they left. You know what I mean. That was the end of that. The sisters legit LEFT the Restaurant!!

Anthony witnessed it like some sort of movie. This is yet an other one of numerous reasons that I do not hang out with [h]im any more. I become creepy by osmosis.

It’s true that Alexandra ALL ways found Anthony “intimidating”, even in High School. But then: she found ME to be that way, too. So she was nuts. Any way: Anthony’s generally unsettling demeanour and terrible dinner habits notwithstanding, we agreed that she was not over me yet. Our server, a young man who was clean-cut, married, but ostensibly “red-pilled” and Shamanistic, shared a laugh with us about it.

So much for Letting Things Go.

Maybe YOU will feel that same way someday.

But I do not mean to sound vain.

I warn you because I care. And because some days I DO give myself enough credit.

I dated one of the Hottest Girls at School.

And she still likes me, even after SHE broke up with ME. Had *I* broken up with HER, she might have internalized the bond submissively. But SHE broke up with ME. And she STILL comes in trying to IMPRESS me, LEAVING with her wing-girls when she FAILS.

I am a Catch.

Dm.A.A.