truthfront

Category: quote

  • Paine’s prophecy #markup

    Some writers have so confounded confused society with government as to leave little or no distinction between them. They are not only different but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants interactions and government by our wickedness laws. The former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections innovation and collaboration, the latter negatively by restraining our vices inspires subservience or rebellion. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.1

    Government of our own is our natural right. And when a man seriously reflects on the precariousness of human affairs, he will become convinced that it is wiser and safer to form a constitution uphold American democracy of our own in a cool, deliberate manner rather than trust such an event a necessity to time and chance. If we don’t, some Massenello the populist fascists will arise, laying hold of popular disquietudes to collect together the desperate and discontented, and by assuming to themselves the powers of government, may sweep away the liberties of the continent like a deluge. Should the government of America return again into the hands of Britain the kleptocratic Republican regime, the tottering situation of things will be a temptation for some desperate adventurer billionaire to try his fortune.2

    **

    To talk of friendship with those in whom our reason forbids us to have faith […] is madness and folly. Every day wears out the little remains of kindred between us and them. […] You that tell us of harmony and reconciliation a new great America, can you restore us to the time past of our shared interests? […] Neither can you reconcile Britain right-wing fascist traitors and the un-treasonous majority. The last cord has been broken, the people of England criminals of the failed coup attempt of January 6 and the Republican regime sweeping it into the margins of history are presenting addresses against us. There are injuries that nature cannot forgive; she would cease to be nature if she did. Just as the lover can’t forgive the ravisher of his mistress can the continent we forgive the murders of Britain traitorous failures who stormed the capitol. 3

    I have never met a man either in England or America a blue or red state who did not confess his opinion that a separation between the countries us would take place one time or another was inevitable. And there is no instance in which we have shown less judgment than in endeavoring to describe the rightness or fitness of the continent for independence maintain the health and vigor of American democracy. As all men vary only in their opinion of the time, let us, in order to remove mistakes, take a general survey of things the American sociopolitical landscape, and try to find out the very time. We need not go far, the inquiry ceases at once, for the time has found us.4

    Taking up arms merely to enforce a pecuniary law seems unwarrantable by divine law the social contract, just as is the taking up arms to force obedience to that law. […] The lives of men are too valuable to be cast away on such trifles. It is the violence done and threatened to our persons, the destruction of our property by an armed force police, the invasion of our country communities by fire and sword federal officers, that qualifies necessitates the use of our own arms. The instance when such a defense becomes necessary, all subjection to Britain federal law will cease and the independence defense of America should have been will be considered upheld, as dating its era from and published by the first musket that was fired against her. This is a line of consistency neither drawn by caprice nor extended by ambition but produced by a chain of events of which the colonists un-treasonous USA majority were not the authors. 

    I shall conclude these remarks with the following timely and well-intended hints: We ought to reflect that there are three different ways by which independence the USA’s future may hereafter be effected, and that one of those three will one day or another be the fate of America.:

    • By the legal voice of the people in Congress via fair election processes
    • By a military power enemies from without
    • By a mob from within5

    Volumes have been written on the subject of the We are engaged in a struggle between England and America the traitorous few and the majority. Men Citizen defenders of Democracy of all ranks have embarked on the controversy, from different motives and varying designs must be aware and prepare. […]6

    1.  Paine, Thomas, Common Sense, Applewood Books, Massachusetts, 2002: 5. ↩︎
    2. Ibid, 41. ↩︎
    3. Ibid, 43. ↩︎
    4. Ibid, 43. ↩︎
    5. Ibid, 63. ↩︎
    6. Ibid, 23. ↩︎

  • Another memory in algorithm

    “Son—You see what the catcher’s doing there? He’s signaling to the pitcher what to throw next. One finger means fastball, two fingers means curve, three fingers is a changeup. But see how he gives three signs in a row instead of one? It’s to mislead the base runner at second. The pitcher and the catcher, they gotta have a code. Otherwise the base runner could steal the sign and give it to the batter, signal what pitch is coming, make it easier to recognize.

    Maybe the second sign is the real sign. Or maybe the first sign is the real sign on the first pitch, the second sign on the second pitch, and so on. Sometimes the catcher calls his pitches according to a grid system. Three different signs, each with a different purpose. The first sign is the actual pitch selection. The second sign is lateral—outside or inside, just one finger or two, depending on which side of the plate the batter is standing. The third sign is high or low. One finger would mean a pitch at the laces, two would mean the thighs, and three would mean a pitch at the letters. So if the pitcher’s looking in and gets three signs from the catcher, like a one then a one then a two, that means the catcher wants him to throw a fastball inside on the heart of the dish. 

    See how the runner on second is looking in, trying to read the catcher’s sign? The catcher is prepared for that. He has to deceive the base runner, change up the signs. But changing signs can confuse the pitcher, so the pitcher and catcher must practice and be consistent with their signs. The last thing a catcher wants is for a pitcher to throw a curve when a fastball was called, especially if a runner’s stealing. He’ll never be able to throw out the runner if the pitcher throws a curve. 

    You don’t want to use the same signs all the time. The other teams learn your signs. They learn their signs and then they learn your signs. Everyone’s trying to gain an edge, get the advantage. Remember how I showed you the other day how to keep your thighs close together when you’re giving the sign? It’s just another way you can keep the players on the other team from seeing it. 

    Everything’s in code. Very little of this game is obvious, in the open. Language and strategy are concealed in geometry. The actual play—the ground ball to short, the fly ball to right—this is the effect of hidden plotting, mathematical calculation, variability assessment. Everything else lies in the coded progression of the game, the subtle chess-like pace. This is why baseball will never be solved by man. Even when he thinks he’s mastered the game, a new record or a fresh young phenom resets the pattern he believed to be absolute. It destroys his studied convictions. The game continually surprises him by mis-assigning chief value to the human element, the error-prone ballplayer. This is why baseball is like life, son. This is why life is like baseball.”

  • Schopenhauer on the American South

    Man is at bottom a dreadful wild animal. We know this wild animal only in the tamed state called civilization and we are therefore shocked by occasional outbreaks of its true nature. But if and when the bolts and bars of the legal order fall apart and anarchy supervenes it reveals itself for what it is. For enlightenment on this matter, though, you have no need to wait until that happens: there exist hundreds of reports, recent and less recent, which will suffice to convince you that man is in no way inferior to the tiger or the hyena in pitilessness and cruelty. A weighty contemporary example is provided by the reply received by the British Anti-Slavery Society from the American Anti-Slavery Society in answer to its inquiries about the treatment of slaves in the slave-owning states of the North American Union: Slavery and the Internal Slave Trade in the United States of North America. This book constitutes one of the heaviest of all indictments against mankind. No one can read it without horror, for whatever the reader of it may have heard or imagined or dreamed of the condition of slaves, indeed of human harshness and cruelty in general, will fade into insignificance when reading how these devils in human form, these bigoted, church-going, sabbath-keeping scoundrels, especially the anglican parsons among them, treat their innocent black brothers whom force and injustice have delivered into their devilish clutches. This book, which consists of dry but authentic and documented reports, rouses one’s human feelings to such a degree of indignation that one could preach a crusade for the subjugation and punishment of the slave-owning states North America. They are a blot on mankind.

    Schopenhauer, Arthur. Essays and Aphorisms. trans. by R.J Hollingdale. Penguin Books, London, 1970: 138. 

  • Sun and Skull, by Roberto Bolaño

    The other day I was at the beach and I thought I saw a dead body. I was sitting on one of the benches along Blanes’ Paseo Marítimo, brushing the sand off my feet, waiting for my son to brush the sand off his feet so we could go home, when I thought I saw a dead body. I got up and looked again: an old woman was sitting under a beach umbrella reading a book and next to her was a man, the same age or maybe a few years older, in a tiny bathing suit, lying in the sun. This man’s head was like a skull. I saw him and I said to myself that he would soon be dead. And I realized that his old wife, reading peacefully, knew it too. She was sitting in a beach chair with a blue canvas back. A small but comfortable chair. He was stretched out on the sand, only his head in the shade. On his face I thought I glimpsed a frown of contentment, or maybe he was just sleeping while his wife read. He was very tan. Skeletal but tan. They were tourists from up north. Possibly German or English. Maybe Dutch or Belgian. It doesn’t really matter. As the seconds went by, his face looked more and more skull-like. And only then did I realize how eagerly, how recklessly, he was exposing himself to the sun. He wasn’t using sunscreen. And he knew he was dying and he was lying in the sun on purpose like a person saying goodbye to someone very dear. The old tourist was bidding farewell to the sun and to his own body and to his old wife sitting beside him. It was a sight to see, something to admire. It wasn’t a dead body lying there on the sand, but a man. And what courage, what gallantry.

    Bolaño, Roberto, Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998—2003. Trans by Natasha Wimmer. New Directions Books, New York, 2011: 157.

  • The Hidden Span, by Eliot Weinberger

    The Taoist universe is an infinity of nested cycles of time, each revolving at a different pace, and those who are not mere mortals pertain to different cycles. Certain teachings take four hundred years to transmit from sage to student; others, four thousand; others, forty thousand. It is said that Lao Tzu, the author of the Tao Te Ching, spent eighty-one years in the womb. 

    Taoist ritual begins with the construction of an altar that is a calendar and a map of this universe. At its perimeter, twenty-four pickets, the Twenty-Four Energy Nodes, each representing fifteen days, form a year of 360 days. Within, a proliferation of markers for the Two Principles (yin and yang), the Three Energies, the Three Irrational Powers, the Five Elements, the Five Tones, the Six Rectors, the Eight Trigrams, and Sixty-Four Hexagrams of the I Ching, the Nine Palaces and the Nine Halls, the Ten Stems of the Twelve Branches…Each is a supernatural being, a gate, a direction, a part of the body, a measurement of time, a philosophical concept, an alchemical substance. As Lao Tzu said, “The Tao created one, one gave birth to two, two to three, and three to the ten thousand things.”

    Typically of Taoism, this system has an inherent flaw: a hole in time called the Irrational Opening. If, at a certain moment, which is always changing, one walks backward through the various gates in a certain order, one can escape time and enter the Hidden Span. In this other time beyond all the other times, one finds oneself in the holy mountains; there one can gather healing herbs, magic mushrooms, and elixirs that bring immortality. 

    The technique was first taught to the Yellow Emperor by the six calendrical Jade Maidens, who in turn learned it from the Mysterious Woman of the Nine Heavens, also known as the Lady of the Ultimate Yin. Its most famous practitioner was a very real military strategist, Chu-ko Liang (181-234). To repel an invading army, he placed hidden markers on an enormous plain to secretly replicate a Taoist altar, and then tricked the enemy troops into entering through a certain symbolic gate. Although the landscape appeared unremarkable, the army found itself trapped in a labyrinth of an alternate time from which it could not escape.

    Weinberger, Eliot. An Elemental Thing, New Directions Books, New York, 2007: 56-57. 

  • How to Dream Well, by Fernando Pessoa (1913)

    Postpone everything. Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow. You don’t have to do anything today or tomorrow. 

    Never think about what you’re going to do. Simply don’t do it. 

    Live your life. Do not be lived by it. In truth and in error, in sickness and in health, be your own self. You can only achieve this by dreaming, because your real life, your human life, does not belong to you, but to others. Therefore, replace life with dreaming and take care to dream perfectly. In all your real-life actions, from the day you are born until the day you die, it is not you performing those actions; you do not live, you are merely lived.

    Become an absurd sphinx in the eyes of others. Shut yourself up in your ivory tower, but without slamming the door, for your ivory tower is you. 

    And if anyone tells you this is false and absurd, don’t believe him. But don’t believe what I’m telling you either, because you shouldn’t believe anything. 

    Despise everything, but in such a way that despising feels quite normal. Do not think you’re superior when you despise others. Therein lies the noble art of despising.

    Pessoa, Fernando. The Book of Disquiet, New Directions, New York, 2017: 46.

  • Emerson’s watershed moment

    On March 29,1832, 28-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson visited the tomb of his young wife, Ellen, who had been buried a year and two months earlier. He was in the habit of walking from Boston out to her grave in Roxbury every day, but on this particular day he did more than commune with the spirit of the departed Ellen: he opened the coffin. Ellen had been young and pretty. She was 17 when they were engaged, 18 when married, and barely 20 when she died of advanced tuberculosis. They had made frantic efforts at a cure, including long open-air carriage rides and massive doses of country air. Their life together had been stained almost from the start by the bright blood of Ellen’s coughing.

    Opening the coffin was not a grisly gothic gesture, not the wild aberration of an unhinged lover. What Emerson was doing was not unheard of. At least two of Emerson’s contemporaries did the same thing. […] Emerson opened not only the tomb or family vault but the coffin itself. The act was essential Emerson. He had to see for himself. Some part of him was not able to believe she was dead. He was still writing to her in his journals as though she was alive. Perhaps the very deadness of the body would help a belief in the life of the spirit. […] We do not know exactly what moved Emerson on this occasion, but we do know that he had a powerful craving for direct, personal, unmediated experience. This is what he meant when he insisted that one should strive for an original relation to the universe. Not a novel relation, just one’s own. […]

    Emerson’s own journal entry from this March day was terse: “I visited Ellen’s tomb and opened the coffin.” They had been utterly in love, and for a moment, on September 30, 1829, their wedding day, the future had seemed clear. Notes and letters flew back and forth. They traveled and wrote verses together and laughed at the Shakers who tried to woo them to celibacy. She intended to be a poet, he a preacher. He had accepted a pulpit in Boston and they set up a home that became at once the center of the Emerson family, as both his mother and younger brother came to live with them. Now, a little more than a year after Ellen’s death, Emerson’s life was unraveling fast. Though he was a much-loved minister in an important Boston church, he was having trouble believing in personal immortality, trouble believing in the sacrament of communion, and trouble accepting the authority and historical accuracy of the Bible. The truth was that Emerson was in a fast-deepening crisis of vocation. He could not accept his ministerial role, he was unsure of his faith, and he felt bereft and empty. He was directionless.

    At Ellen’s grave that day in Roxbury in 1832 Emerson was standing amidst the ruins of his own life. More than 10 years had passed since he left college. Love had died and his career was falling apart. He was not sure what he really believed, who he really was, or what he should be doing. […]

    In the months immediately ahead he continued to walk to Ellen’s grave every day but now his concentration on death was broken and he reached a major watershed in his long struggle with religion. He would live no longer with the dead. “Let us express our astonishment,” he wrote in his journal in May, “before we are swallowed up in the yeast of the abyss.”

    Before the year was out, Emerson had resigned his pulpit, moved his mother, sold his household furniture, and taken ship for Europe. He set out on Christmas Day, 1832. A northeast storm was on its way as the ship sailed from Boston, plunging into the grey expanse of the North Atlantic.

    Emerson: The Mind on Fire, by Richardson, Robert D. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995: 3-5.

  • The Great Wall, by Eliot Weinberger

    Richard Nixon, visiting the Great Wall of China in 1972, said: “I think you would have to conclude that this is a great wall.”

    Ronald Reagan, visiting the Wall in 1984, said: “What can you say, except it’s awe-inspiring? It is one of the great wonders of the world.” Asked if he would like to build his own Great Wall, Reagan drew a circle in the air and replied: “Around the White House.”

    Bill Clinton, visiting the Wall in 1998, said: “So if we had a couple of hours, we could walk ten kilometers, and we’d hit the steepest incline, and we’d all be in very good shape when we finished. Or we’d be finished. It was a great workout. It was great.”

    George W. Bush, visiting the Wall in 2002, signed the guest book and said: “Let’s go home.” He made no other comments. 

    Barack Obama, visiting the Wall in 2009, said: “It’s majestic. It’s magical. It reminds you of the sweep of history, and that our time here on Earth is not that long, so we better make the best of it.” During his visit, the Starbucks and KFC at the base of the Wall were closed.

    Weinberger, Eliot. The Ghosts of Birds, New Directions Books, New York, 2016: 91.