Reply to “Dover Beach” on WordPress: Why Do We “hate” Putin?

We learned that Putin was lying and preparing everything he did toward the US to serve his plan for expansion, as is explicit in Dugin. Getting Trump elected in exchange for weakening the Magnitsky sanctions and NATO, and that election fraud for which Trump was impeached, and the attempted insurrection, the disregard for elections and opinion as malleable to Putin’s interests- he is a tyrant. The question for you is: Is tyranny good? Is it necessary?
The Magnitsky sanctions were upheld in the US Senate 98-2. I do not know what clearer point could crack through the assumption that a Hitler would not use fake news while accusing others of fake news. Some will fall for it.

Gulagging 1.6 million Ukrainians- supposedly fellow “Russians,” is a good start. One cannot expect brown and yellow people to fare better under Russofascism-and these are fellow Christians. We have tried to tell the communists, too, that he is no longer communist. I’m just glad YOU are not subject to fake news! WE, who do not listen to Fox news and the official Russian media, but 27 free sources that cohere, are the ones in danger of being deceived! But “hate” is of course not the right word, nor is fear.

I received a friendly threat from ole Vlad- apparently through a mediary. its published on WordPress. I consider such things confirmation. He is a gangster with strap on nukes- but we suspect his followers truly honor gangsters, if they expand Russia, regardless.

The Four Part Indication

Often when discussing with Atheists the reason that it is clear that God must be, though we do not know what God is, I will tell them that there is a four part “demonstration,” or rather indication, that something of the sort must be so, and is. I tell them that they do not have the patience for even this, and so might return to the traditional “proofs.” Proofs and demonstration are an odd way of speaking in this matter, since as we think from Aristotle we have learned that first principles are not demonstrated, as though they were a conclusion drawn from other premises, but are rather “seen.” This, then, is an ascending argument showing that it cannot be thought either that modern science has looked everywhere and refuted the existence of “gods,” nor that God is not.

Beginning from artificial beings: My chair is made of wood. Smash the chair. I still have all the wood. But no chair. The question is: What is the shape of the chair made of?

The shape of course has more to do with it being a chair than does the wood. Language gets a-hold of a class characteristic, of a kind of furniture as are tables and lamps. It is odd that the form of things is less durable than the “matter,” while the production of chairs can be repeated endlessly using the same form, but different matter. What makes it a chair is also related to geometry, the perpendicular, and the fact of weight and gravity. And we are mostly all familiar with the account from the physics of Aristotle regarding the 4 causes. The purpose of course guides the form, and a four legged chair must be better than a three legged stool for various purposes. But this, while so for artificial things made by man, does not seem at all so for the shape of rocks or even rivers and horizons and clouds. The shapes of these seem more accidental.

Purpose and the distinct form of objects beyond the accidental seem to enter, it our ontic presentation rising from the origins, only with the advent of Life. Life is very strange, and it it is difficult to say what is the difference between living and non-living matter. But with life, we get a sharp distinction between subject and object, and the subordination of part to whole. Purpose also enters nature here, as ferns seek sunlight, and reproducing beings seek to continue. Solid, liquid and gas (earth, air and water) are mixed with fire (energy) to produce an ongoing reaction similar to an internal combustion engine- and though these cars imitate living beings as do all artifacts, and even here imitate the generation of power and motion of the animals, it is also clear that these lack purposes or their own, and are not living beings. This though they can have something like a “health,” as the mechanic knows, and there is an art of tending this allegorical “health” of the auto- if one’s purpose is to drive and not to junk it.

It is with animate life that self motion enters into our ascent. Plants would find a great advantage in being able to move themselves into the sunlight, though nature has yet to produce this variation. Very few plants can move at all- the Venus fly trap, and a few others. The generation of moss is very interesting, as these have a stage where the spore is able to swim to a place where the plant then roots. Slime molds- which can apparently crawl up telephone poles- are another window into the very revealing roots of self motion in nature. The amoeba is another such window. Assuming the subordination of part and whole which entered nature with the plants, self motion doers not violate the “laws of thermodynamics,” when, say, our dog suddenly gets up and brings us the ball to play- though for every action there must be an equal and opposite reaction,” etc. Self motion is based upon contraction and then extension of a part out from the whole.

Purpose in nature has been rejected, of course, with the Lamarkian theory of the origins of the species in nature, in favor of accidental variation and changing kinds. We note that our “science,” though, simply assumes the kinds, then reasons about material and efficient causes regarding these, without attempting to understand, say, what make the ball Galileo rolls one thing, when he is demonstrating that objects fall at the same rate regardless of their weight (32’/sc/sc, accelerating). Our science similarly assumes the demarcation of biology and physics, with living and non-living matter, without being able to say what the difference is, and we see that Life would have to be considered a fifth being, not explainable in therms of earth, air water and fire, any more than the difference between a tree and the rest of the cosmos, or that of part and whole within a cell, is going to be explainable in terms of causes efficient and material. Hence, we cannot make life- rather, it comes only from the original spark, all living things on earth apparently having descended literally from a single source, so that all life is literally “akin.”

We say this: As there is a “ground” of the shape of the chair in the eternal truths of geometry, “within” which the chair occurs- for the truth of the Pythagorean theorem looks like it has not come to be to pass away, but is true always and of every triangle, whether it is ever even drawn- AS there is such an eternal ground in geometry for every artificial being, so there is a ground in the intelligible for life and self motion. Hierarchies of part and whole were always possible, as is known for a certainty, since these have come to be, and life itself was always possible in the nature of things, even if judging empirically from the view of what we say about 13 Billion years ago. Was the Pythagorean theorem true in “40 Billion B.C.?” But we say it is the same eternal ground that is revealed by the manifestation of life as that revealed by planets and crystals, configurations of molecules and rivers, and the triangle known to exist between the centers of any three objects. Hence God too is called “The living One,” and “cause of life,” eternal and the cause of the intelligibility of things. To say this cause of life is itself “alive” is strange, though it must be that and more, as the ground is geometrical, without a single mistake, though it is this and more. The ground is “one,” yet the forms themselves even of living things rise and fall and change, something as the glass is one on which the moisture freezes fractally to form the shapes that look like leaves.

Life, self motion, and then there is man. As there is an eternal ground of self motion and life and artificial objects, so we say there is an eternal ground of man, and as life is different from the non-living, and self-motion from merely vegetating, so man is dimension-ally different from the animal upon which human life has supervened, much as motion has supervened upon the plant and life itself upon the matter and energy it must be said to use (-for clearly the matter has no purpose in using us!). This we say again occurs without violating any of the supposed laws of physics or biology by which one might think hierarchy and purpose impossible- for here it is, revealing too that this was always possible in being. Wonder, reason, language, “conscience,” music, love, compassion, justice, all enter uniquely with the human, as we note, it is only humans who purse science, literature, etc.

Our psychiatry attempts to reduce the human dimension to the non-human. It is not that they get hold of absolutely nothing by this, but it is rather as trying to understand a sphere from its shadow in 2 dimensions, which will likely appear in the shape of a football. When viewed from within the two dimensional plane, this may also appear as a single line.

What the human soul reveals about being is dimension-ally more than what life reveals about the intelligible ground of being. We are each said to be “persons,” with our own names, and family names too imitate the kinds of beings, genetically same and different, as all things are both the same and different. So too, as we say He is the Living One, so we also say He is a person, or that our being persons is one way in which the soul or man is said to be an “image of God.” He has said to Moses: “I am.” But this saying- like the use of the word for being as a noun- is found independently in both the Greek and Hebrew writings (Plato, Republic 501b-c, etc). In both it is the cause of the laws. That two directions should arrive at the same is the confirmation of coherence- not certain knowledge, such as that hypothetical knowledge of what must follow. In the allegory of the cave, the one ascending turns from the images seen in water to the beings, and then from man and the other things, turns to see the Most High reflected. One allegory given in the divided line (Republic, Book VI) is that the Good is to the intellect as the sun is to the eye- with rays from a single source casting its light on the visible things. Socrates turned from the attempt to study nature directly, as done by the natural philosophers, and as we say is done erroneously by both those who talk of “Being” and those who talk of attributes based upon assumptions. Socrates turns to the what is questions of the human things, through man ascending to the highest principles. We say the imago Dei is even the true offspring, of which the “child of the good” is said to be the “fraudulent offspring.” That the Good is “beyond being” is the famous highest Socratic or Platonic formulation, not as personal as the Thinking Thought of Aristotle, but perhaps beyond the difference between the “personal” and “impersonal.”

That “Nous” or intellect is begotten in man or of man is also common between the New Testament and Socratic philosophy. It is this we say is an image of God, and from this one can see that the Christ is, or may just, be possible. What amazes us is that his words- love your enemies, etc. are unique, simple high true, and indeed the bread of life, things one gets the impression Socrates was too moderate or did not have the authority to teach. This again is a point of coherence. And again, we say that knowledge of the sort involved in wisdom is in the soul of each, as if from prior to our mortal origins. As the wing implies that there is earth and sky- evolving by chance in 3 or 5 different places in natural history- though the wheel, never, so we say God has formed, by the nature of things, as by his very hands, the capacities of the human soul that reveal by ascent the truth of the things of heaven. Science has no more explanation, let alone refutation, of these indications, nor can it even be consistently thought that nothing beyond the intelligible is Most High.

Caldwell II: Complex Indeed

What we have here are two opposed scenarios, two opposed comprehensive views, and I will show that the Russian view is an intentional falsehood portrayed for us toward the end of power, while what we say is actually occurring aims to oppose and prevent a world catastrophe similar to the second war, with causes that are similar- a tyrant seeking to expand his own power without limit. Now, some of our friends here on the right support Putin because they are sincerely duped, while others support him knowing he is an expanding tyrant, as these have given up on what is called democracy or free self government, due to what is seen as a degeneration of the left extreme of US popular opinion. This means that our argument 1) that they are duped becomes the argument 2) that tyranny is bad, or is an even worse degeneration than they are now thinking possible. The argument against the really “Big Lie” becomes the argument against the purpose of the big lie.

Would Caldwell oppose Stalin, or would he rather praise him as a strong ruler?” Would he sanitize tyranny with the replacement neutral word “autocrat?” Does Caldwell oppose tyranny, and if not, can this position be said to be “American?” Or has that- and the credo of the second sentence of the Declaration- not become irrelevant, because something else has become more important?

How much a part of Russia Ukraine was even under Stalin is shown by the famine in the Ukraine called Holomor, when 2 million Ukrainians starved while the Soviet tyranny reallocated food to the Russians. Caldwell would have us view Ukraine as divided between East and West, with the Eastern Ukrainians wanting to be a part of Russia. Even the Ukrainian Orthodox church, though, is separate from the Russian, and the Western Ukraines have been a separate people since the Mongol invasion of 1248. No more does Moscow have any historic claim to rule Kyiv than Kyiv has to rule Moscow, and surely less- Kiev was ruled from Volograd for a time, but never from Moscow, until the Soviet empire ate all neighboring nations into the belly of the most murderous tyranny the world had yet seen- and that is statistical and agreed upon- 40-70 million Russians were killed by their own communist tyranny over a 70 year period the world hoped might have come to an end. Now one who seeks to restore this justly termed evil empire seeks to expand, and Caldwell would have the US republicans do nothing to oppose this expansion.

Not giving Putin blood money is termed “economic warfare against Russia” (p. 6). We can simply refuse to play with the bully, in economic terms- no one has to do business with Russia. Those who have mistaken Russia for a normal business opportunity, such as Bill Browder, or Germany, have learned a lesson the hard way.

Assets are frozen, and the alternative is that the world community of nations allow Russia to expand with every drip of fuel, submerging literally millions more in the iron system of Russian rule by fear of heinous murder. Some might still play with such a fellow, but we don’t have to. Business assumes a mutual decency and a world of common sense where property is usually secured, as in, by “trust.” Would it be shocking to say of Putin that even those who work for him- or especially those he finds useful- would be fools to “trust” him?

Caldwell would perhaps rather have us conduct business as usual, and he knows the rhetorical power of the present economic weather with the US voter. Which one of these would contribute to the project of Putin in exchange for lower gas prices, let him stand up! Let him confess this to the Ukraines receiving repeated targeting of civilians- would you finance one more missile? I am afraid the answer of Caldwell is that he would, or that he does not care.

Tweets preserved:

Is Caldwell’s Putin the same as the man the Senate voted 98-2 to sanction for the torture and murder of Sergei Magnitsky? The right and all the executive agencies seem to have been deceived to think Putin our ally in the war on terror. It is indeed, how Bin Laden switched his enmity from defense against Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to fighting America as though it were some “great Satan.” Seeing now that the Russian plan for expansion has been in the works as an option for some time, one can only wonder at the opposition of Islam to the nation that allows liberty even to Islam.

Another response must be coming. His 9/22 essay has not changed a bit. 1.6 million Ukraines have been gulagged. Imprimis Critique: Meyer and Caldwell https://mmcdonald77.wordpress.com/2017/04/26/imprimis-critique-meyer-and-caldwell/… via

@mmcdonald77

Putin has had it over on the US right, beginning with the “intellectuals.” Caldwell keeps the focus on that degenerate left extreme, those bad liberals, ignores the rising fascism, and would sell America to have the conservative platform.

A world of unimaginable ugliness is possible, especially if we do not believe it, but have to see it. Um, Putin did not invade Ukraine because of NATO. He is a tyrant seeking power, and will use whatever reason. These BELIEVE as policy in using fake reasons. He is not going to say: “that is mine,” “because I want it,” “and can take it, and hold this to be more important than many lives.” It is shocking that this need be spelled out to these students of politics and the constitution. Time and again, Putin does what he wants in seeking power, while selecting some reason that might justify such apparent violence, Ukrainian Nazism and such, “terrorism,” etc. A part of opinion, especially inside Russia and among its allies, receives these predictable and patterned rationalizations as though there were no difference between naked injustice and the genuine defense against tyranny and villainy. These reasons are oddly drawn from an inversion of the tyrants own looking glass- for just as Trump knows that his own mode of operation is election fraud, so Putin knows his own aim is a limitless and total power to which Nazism is more akin than any tyranny that has yet emerged in human history.

NATO is of course not an empire but a defensive alliance against the expansion of Russian tyranny. The obvious needs sometimes to be stated. Whether Russia seeks world rule and our destruction under the banner of fascism or communism is irrelevant to NATO. Putin of course insisted that NATO say they will NEVER allow Ukraine to enter the defensive alliance- This is the basis of Putin’s accusation- now obscured for all US “Republicans.” Putin insisted NATO do this when he had 100,000 troops on the border of Ukraine- since he had in truth already decided to invade, and nothing could be found to deter him. NATO did nothing but not jump when Putin called the tune- Putin insisted that Ukraine submit and Europe do nothing. Putin planned to invade Ukraine regardless, accepting only the same submission as Belarus, regardless of what NATO did or did not do. His plan was all along, it would seem, to move in the 5th year after Trump’s election, though he planned on Trump winning a second term-and he almost did.

If we are ever going to say “no” to Putin despite his nuclear blackmail, we may as well do it now- before he has destroyed Ukraine, etc, and taken all the people into the gulag as far as he can reach into Europe. Moldavia and Finland are next, and the whole ex-Soviet empire explicitly targeted. The issue is indeed more complex than any public account, any scenario that can guide public opinion. Caldwell cites Kennan and Burns on the obvious reason that officially admitting the Ukraine to NATO was not then next. That either would agree that we should do nothing is just as doubtful as that that either would agree that we should leap into the war ourselves- the circumstance is new and extremely difficult, and the Ukrainians are bearing the brunt of the fighting in order that the “West” might avoid expanding the war, in the nuclear age.

As for sending hardware into Ukraine, as Putin has of course also been doing: If we are ever going to say “No” to Putin despite his nuclear blackmail, we may as well do it now- before he has destroyed Ukraine, etc, and taken all the people into the gulag as far as he can reach into Europe’ Moldavia and Finland are next, the whole ex-Soviet empire. There are reasons of strategic and strictly national interest involved here. For the other part, one might as well face the question of whether we are willing to submit to Russian rule due to the fear of nuclear war. Our suggestion is that that is not how these things work, but rather one of the various instances of slavishness and the failure of integrity that have left us vulnerable to what is now occurring.

On page we get to the truer issue

Now, we have 7 guys who are charged, some with lying to the FBI, and were “Pardoned,” and the issue is Russian election fraud assistance: Flynn, Gates, Manafort, Stone. Popo, Cohen, Giuliani and Sessions should be questioned.

But one wonders if ANY action of trading US foreign policy for election fraud would not be just fine with Caldwell, and THAT may be the real issue. He is a Russian asset, in whatever sense, influencing the opinion of the voters- thanks.

Congress must question Trump under oath in detail about Russian interference. Kasperski was handling internet security for 400 million accounts FROM MOSCOW for the 2016 election. They interfered with the opinion of the voters by marketing, intimidation and mechanical means.

Remember? Reblog From Straight Arrow: No “Collusion?” Sater, Cohen and Trump Tower Moscow https://mmcdonald77.wordpress.com/2018/04/14/remember-reblog-from-straight-arrow-no-collusion-sater-cohen-and-trump-tower-moscow/… via

@mmcdonald77

On page 6, Caldwell asserts that fighting back is what is costing lives in Ukraine, not the Russian attack and invasion. “Why are you resisting?” the East Pointe police officer said on tape while beating one arrested. “Stop resisting.” That is just fine too with tyrants.

“Budapest Memorandum” is another word the diplomatic Caldwell does not use. In the 1994 agreement, Russia agreed to the territorial integrity of Ukraine in exchange for nuclear hardware and a de-nuclearized Ukraine. In violating this agreement, the other parties are no longer bound to keep their bargain either. Ukraine is an independent nation sick to death of Putin’s explicitly expansionist tyranny. The whole of Europe has been threatened explicitly if NATO did not state Ukraine would NEVER join! That is to say, unless Russia may invade and NATO do nothing.

A response is required, as 6.2 million readers receive this pamphlet monthly. I do not want to note off the cuff, things such as “the same could be said of Hitler in ’38, and Calwell would not notice.” Perhaps he would not care. Fascism is another word he does not use.

No part of the Ukraine wants to be Russian. One would think from Caldwell the whole eastern Ukraine was, like, oppressed by Zelenski. And Austrians were forbid to speak German! “right up to their doorstep, “meddle with Russias vital interests” !!

The problem is of course that this expansionist tyrant begins armed with nuclear weapons, while World War II nearly ended with Hitler so armed.

Isaac Newton, On Daniel and the Apocalypse, II.iii

Citing Paul in Romans XI on the olive tree, and Zechariah, Newton also reads that the two witnesses of Revelation 11 and 13 are churches, and not new churches. I read these not in connection with the seven churches of Rev. 2-3, but rather the two legs of the dream image in Daniel 2. We read the churches not as all good, as the Christians will, nor the Roman church as all evil, as the Protestants and Newton do, but as both, as human things are in this world.

These are usually read as individuals, repeating the prophesy that Elijah would precede the Messiah, as John the Baptist did. This is the first reader I have found to see the olive trees of Revelation 11:3:

While the Gentiles tread the holy city under foot, God gives power to his two Witnesses, and they prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days clothed in sackcloth. They are called the two Olive-trees, with relation to the two Olive-trees, which in Zechary‘s vision, chap. iv. stand on either side of the golden candlestick to supply the lamps with oil: and Olive-trees, according to the Apostle Paul, represent Churches, Rom. xi. They supply the lamps with oil, by maintaining teachers. They are also called the two candlesticks; which in this Prophecy signify Churches, the seven Churches of Asia being represented by seven candlesticks. Five of these Churches were found faulty, and threatned if they did not repent; the other two were without fault, and so their candlesticks were fit to be placed in the second Temple. These were the Churches in Smyrna and Philadelphia. They were in a state of tribulation and persecution, and the only two of the seven in such a state: and so their candlesticks were fit to represent the Churches in affliction in the times of the second Temple, and the only two of the seven that were fit. The two Witnesses are not new Churches: they are the posterity of the primitive Church, the posterity of the two wings of the woman, and so are fitly represented by two of the primitive candlesticks. We may conceive therefore, that when the first Temple was destroyed, and a new one built for them who worship in the inward court, two of the seven candlesticks were placed in this new Temple.

Isaac Newton Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John, II,iii

Ramones: Selection from the Rock Commentaries

The Ramones 1977: Rocket to Russia 

As Hendrix said, “we’ll never have surf music again…until the Ramones!” But here the surf music is joined to the Spector Ronnie and the Ronnettes “wall of sound” to imitate and dramatize a wave of elemental emotion. Dance music returns to rock here at the origins of Punk, just before the Pistols messed it up with safety pins and all. The Ramones are deceptively deep minimalist artists. They reduce the lyric emotions to their elements, making their ballads surprisingly beautiful. With a bite of sarcasm mixed with just fun pop dance music they begin the recovery of the right wing politics previously rejected. With Lou Reed and David Bowie, we have begun to move beyond the hippy rock of the Sixties and early Seventies. The stunning album cover, produced by a member and a friend, is done in a cartoon style borrowed from a child’s geography book we had in the sixties, before PC prevented such uncouth caricatures. But the Ramones are almost all in good fun. Our favorites are the Rasta man in Jamaica and Fidel, with his cigar. The Rocket would seem to refer to the conquest of the world for liberty through music: the album is such a thing.

The Cretin Hop is named after a street, in turn named after a French Priest Creti’an where the Ramones fans would dance. It also sounds like a race of man from the past, in the glory days of ancient Crete. From the video’s on U Tube of the German concerts, those guys are asleep! Have we no pictures of Hoppin Cretins? At Royal Oak Theater in 1977, we hopped like wildkids. We borrowed the Suburban from the parental units that night and drove a load of Punks, seven in all, down for the show. We were the class of 78, and the class or 77 had some famous artists who introduced Punk to our High School. We all know who they are, too, one wore a jacket and looks just like DD, there in the High School Yearbook. Another, we were just talking about that concert in his driveway the other day, almost forty years later!

Rockaway Beach too is a fun dance song, about a local beach. The Punk beat is well adapted to tapping teeth, so he is “chewin’ out a rhythm on my bubble gum.” It is the Bus Ride that is too slow, and besides they blast Disco, so they will take another rout, and hitchhike. There follow three sad love songs, a break-up song, “Locket Love,” and then a despairing breakup song. These are Punk ballads. “Locket” is just beautiful poetry, if it is a bit harsh. Sheena is an archetypal groupie. The Whiskey Au Go Go is where the first hippies turned from surf music to psychedelic rock. Now Sheena is returning to New York. Side one then ends with “We’re a Happy Family.” This is a sarcastic song about themselves, exaggerated into a  commentary on the generation growing up to parents of the sixties. “Thorazine” is the first word in a commentary on modern psychiatric medicine. Thorazine (chlorpromazine) was introduced in the late fifties to treat schizophrenia by inhibiting dopamine receptors. This lead to the revolution in psychiatric institutions, where a safer, more human environment could be made by suppressing the brains of the mad. Side effects include “tardative dyskenesis,” a twitching similar to punk rhythm gutar. This commentary on modern psychiatry continues in “Lobotomy” and “Well” on Side Two. A lobotomy is the removal of the front of a guys brain, as occurred to McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The best medical advice that money could buy persuaded the Kennedy family to have this done to Rosemarie back in the Fifties. There is no scientific knowledge on which lobotomies are prescribed, and no ethical reasoning either, but the subjects do indeed stop saying funny things and causing trouble. “Tell ’em” and “cerebellum” are another ironic joke. DDT is a poison pesticide sprayed on everyone in the fifties and sixties, until we began to realize that we just cannot do such things and be well. “Well” is of course psychological health or happiness, the goal of psychology. The pesticide is playfully his remedy for keeping happy while the slugs and snails are after him. As the Americans tried to cure the problem of garden pests with DDT, so modern psychiatry treats garden variety psychosis with drugs that are worse than the original pests. Psychiatric medicine is poison, and the Americans fall for it just like they did DDT. Cha-ching! The American way. The American concern with slugs and snails is a psychosis. Nor is Thorazine the proper prescription for being a Punk. Punk here is a rejection of psychiatry, the modern authority regarding the health of the soul. Punk anger is expressed through sarcastic comedy. “Future’s Bleak / Aint it neat?” and “No Future” become punk themes. There is something to the punk rejection of the authority in their world that is based on common sense, and a liberty-securing defiance that will fight if one does not leave them alone. Their bleak future is the result of the world they have been given, not one of their making. “Neat” is a word from the beatniks, meant as a sarcastic glance backward. Holy smoke. Daddy’s broke.

Ramona is the word written on the shirt of the rider on the rocket, and the song “Ramona” was once titled “Rocket to Russia.” No one has even attempted to account for this. The lyrics seem to be about a flirtatious groupie with whom the writer fell in love. She seems to be the essential Ramones groupie, a pilgrim punk chic. But there is more to her than Sheena. The key lyrics seem to be:

I let her in, if your wonder’in why

Cause (or: when) she’s a spy for the BBI

I let her in and I started to cry

And then I wanted to die

We do not know what BBI means, but there are those who spy for them. The Ramones are an American band, from New York, of course, eating re-fried beans in Queens. If it is the British Bureau, it may have occurred on tour, or the U. S. may have used the British to get around that little thing in the Constitution once interpreted to mean they cannot spy on us, especially for cultural and artistic reasons. The effect of falling in love with one who turns out to be a spy is first that he began to cry, and second that he wanted to die. Indeed, as for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, it is very disturbing, even to the roots of one’s citizenship, to have love used to enter ones soul in spying. No one has ever been held accountable for such an act. Yet, since the idea that it is fine if we prostitute our citizens for the purpose of spying on them has recently become assumed, and after all, “what have we to hide” – if we ever did stand up and hold these governments accountable for what was done, achieving meaningful recourse and firing those responsible for such a blatant and complete violation of our Constitution, then it might be understandable why “Ramona” the song is the rocket to Russia that secures liberty. Otherwise these parts of the meaning are incomprehensible.

Ramona may be the subject of Locket Love. The latter could not be a Sheena. “I Don’t Care” follows “Locket” in the arrangement of Side One, so like Ramona, it is one that took him to the edge. She had a lovely locket, a badge or picture, one that never does try to expose her for what she put him through. “I can’t give you anything” may show that he has recovered or become “well.” He is offering himself in courtship, but like the lyric love, has nothing to offer.

“Why is it always this Way” is the tragic conclusion that shows that Punk humor is gallows humor. He just saw her, who seems just a girl in the neighborhood, going to the laundry mat and waving to him, and now she is- again chemo-metaphorically- encased in formaldehyde, like the anatomy subjects from High School class. He just does not know why he cannot let her go. The implied criticism of the psychology-governed modern world, evoking the Punk reaction, is a profound statement or musical accompaniment of the anti-psychiatry movement. This voice has quietly and steadily gained momentum ever since.

Poem: Knowledge of the Soul

Knowledge of the Soul

Knowledge of the soul

In soul’s own book is wrapped

In papers manifold

proportions, harmonies of kind

The lives of noble kings and queens unfold

The images divine.

The light on man awakens her

Emerging beauty to behold in time

The hero’s penance wakens her

And clears the eye of mind.

And So:

Knowledge of the soul

Is wrapped in books its own

Recalled anew to each each time

A dance ensouled

Of memory and mind.

Louie Louie: Rock Commentaries Selection:

Louie Louie: 1955 Richard Berry

 Written by the blues man Richard Berry, who performed the piece as rock blues in 1989, Louie Louie may be the best candidate for the first Rock song. The 1955 version rocks as much as the Kingsmen, and the lyrics are audible, after the fifties style that reminds of the Platters. A version by Rockin’ Robin Roberts from 1955 adds the comment introducing the rockabilly guitar solo, “All right, now you give it to ‘em.” (You Tube). The Berry performance at J. J’s Blues Cafe indicates yet un-mined possibilities for a Classic Rock version yet to come. Iggy Pop performed the song in Europe, giving the one lyric people usually know, “Me gotta go now” a political, suicidal and punk meaning, making this in a way the punk song, and continuing the tradition of protest against the obvious illiberties of our very modern world, like “America is filling the world with garbage.” (Granted, but Berlin is closer to Chernobyl, where the people have no say, and pollution is worse.) When the Kingsmen released “Louie Louie” in 1963 there was a fury of protest which included bizarre guesses as to what the lyrics, difficult to decipher, might be. Famously, the F.B.I., following the Indiana Governor (who in turn was following the gossip of girls and women) investigated the song for the supposed obscenities which outraged parents imagined that they were hearing in the garbled words of the song. The actual lyrics were written and recorded by Richard Berry in 1955, and recorded in a less famous but arguably superior version. The lyrics tell a love story in three parts:

Fine little girl she waits for me

Me catch the ship for cross the sea

Me sail the ship all alone

Me never thinks me make it home.

(Chorus) Louie, Louie, Oh, no baby, Me Gotta Go

 Three Nights and Days me sail the sea

Me think of girl constantly

On the ship I dream she there

I smell the Rose in her hair.

(Chorus, guitar solo)

 Me see Jamaican moon above

It won’t be long, me see my love

I take her in my arms and then

Me tell her I never leave again

Louie, Louie, (oh no, baby,) me gotta go

Louie, Louie, (oh, baby,) me gotta go

(Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC)

The song is not perverse in the least, but is in fact a rather simple and beautiful Jamaican love song. As will be addressed momentarily, it is about true love rather than the animal appetite, and has of course nothing to do with the perversions imagined by those complaining to the F.B.I. But first, something profound appears from reflecting on Louie Louie. It is written in the most common lyric structure of three verses of four lines with a Chorus in between, making up five parts, or six if the Chorus is repeated at the end. The chorus or refrain, the part repeated amid the stanzas, ought to contain the principle of the song, while the stanzas elaborate the principle by showing its unfolding in the particular. It contains a drama or story in the simplest way possible, abstracted, leaving a great many things out to distill the essential experience of the soul. In its dramatic setting, it is sung by a Jamaican man who has a girl, or, is in love. In his circumstance, she waits for him while he catches a ship aiming to journey across the sea. It is not clear where he is going, but the reason he goes may be how the refrain connects to the three verses. It seems to mean something like “oh, boy, I gotta get out of here.” The circumstance is an example of the content of what Carl Jung might call an “archetype,” indicated by a pattern common to the structure of myth and symbol in many, if not in every, culture of mankind in many places and times. The truth about true love, at least of one sort, is that the lover sets off on a journey of the soul that is compared to the sailing of a ship across the sea, aiming at the transcendent “other shore.” Sometimes the princess is found on the other shore, and this is a different kind of love. Examples are found in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and A Midsummer Nights Dream (II, i, 126-127), and many other places. The pattern of land-sea-other shore, or “leaving and returning,” as Steven Rowe took this up,[2] is also found in the quest for knowledge, and is either the same as this quest or a natural image of it, occurring on a lower level in a pattern that is the same or similar. It is evident too in the journey of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain then there is” is a similar three part expression, borrowed apparently from Buddhist teaching, by Donovan. Five parts to the journey can be seen, if one could include the return across the sea and the return home.

In this case, though, our sailor does not seem to arrive at the other shore, but has an experience of missing her that makes him return home determined never to leave again. It turns out that the ship he caught is a single person sail boat in which he sails all alone. He apparently gets lost, since he thinks he will never succeed at returning home. So ends the first verse.

At the start of the second and central verse, our sailor, in despair of ever returning and thinking he will die, is found sailing the seas for three nights and days. This period of time is the same, for example, as the time between the crucifixion and the resurrection, or the time Jonah spent in the belly of the whale. He thinks of his beloved constantly, and has a hallucinatory dream experience in which he thinks that she is there with him on the ship. The experience is so real that he believes he can smell the rose flower in her hair. The near apparition might be called by Jung an image caused by that in the soul which he calls “anima.” The word derived from Latin simply means soul or life, but it has here a more particular meaning, such as that in “you’re my soul and my inspiration.” The lover, who has never seen any of the higher things before, sees this in the beloved. Jung is the modern authority on this, and introduced the idea, with that of the archetypes, into modern psychology.[3] He was attempting to understand the permanent structures of the human psyche and the spiritual nature of man that is the cause of the notable similarities in the products of the human imagination. He introduced an understanding of the unconscious deeper than the Freudian repository of repressed memories, a living source of myth and symbol, often emerging to compensate the one sided conscious mind. The anima is the feminine unconscious of a man projected in love, the cause of the numinous manifestation and exaggerated beauty of the one loved, as Aphrodite casts her aspersions. The corresponding function in a woman is called by Jung animus, after the Latin word for spirit, and so every love is a dance of spirit and soul. Animus is more the understanding of the hero, as knights would once perform labors for their ladies. Jung writes: Every real love relation consists in the woman finding her hero and the hero his soul, not in dreams, but in palpable reality.” There is, then, a knowledge of the things of love within the human soul.

In the third verse, he has not yet arrived home, but has at least found his bearings again. He sees the Jamaican moon above, indicating that he is on a rout headed home. He has resolved that when he returns, he will take her in his arms and tell her that he will never leave again. The conclusion is then something like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, who concludes that there is no place like home. The song expresses the things about the soul that might be involved for example in a man who leaves his beloved to play the field a bit before marriage, learning what he needed to, that is, how much he really wants his true love permanently. Yet the expression is anything but common. Through the symbol, the particular becomes an image that connects us to the universal human experience, through something like the knowledge in the human soul about itself. According to the ancient teaching, the soul contains knowledge, especially of human things, and if we try and do not give up, it is possible to remember or recollect all things,^[4] or to recollect the access to the contemplation of all things, in a certain sense (Plato, Meno, 81). This knowledge in the soul of man is both the cause of the images produced by the soul and of the numinous attraction that is characteristic of transcendent beauty.[5]

Finally, in an astonishing late note, The lead singer for the Kingsmen, Jack Ely, has said in an interview on the web that the song, or the phrase “Me gotta go,” is sung to a bartender on this shore, by one who was once a sailor, about returning to his love in Jamaica, in Rasta dialect out of affection for the land of his love. This gives the image a five part structure, and makes the song much better, with a successful crossing rather than an aborted crossing of the water, whether he is Jamaican or American. “Me gotta go,” or to sing Louie Louie, is to leave America, or to leave the bar or the gathering of gold here on the other shore, to set off for love and home again, and this, unconsciously, is the most essential rock phrase.

The supposedly obscene rock lyrics are actually a simple love song. As will be shown, when the soul produces a love song, it tends to expresses and uphold true love. These things are difficult to discuss in words, let alone in science, yet we cannot discuss music unless some effort is made. Love is of course different from the animal appetite for sex. It is a human thing, and tends to be disinterested in all others except the one loved, at least for a time. Hence the lover is called “true” or faithful and this sort of love distinguished, as a great blessing, from false love, which only appears to be genuine, and is characterized by infidelity. We, the lovers, surely note that the vast majority seem incapable of true love, though their lives stability depend upon love’s semblance. One astounding thing found in the present study of contemporary music is that, especially among the classics, the love songs about true love outnumber the songs about sex by ten or one hundred fold. Apparently the soul does not write much inspired poetry about the old rock and roll, but rather, writes about love, since this is where the human touches on the immortal. As Socrates tells Phaedrus, beauty is the only one of the eternal forms to be allowed visible manifestation (Phaedrus, 250 c). Even so, beauty must hide and be hidden (Herodotus, I.16). To see for example wisdom in the visible, would overwhelm our natures. This is surprising, and even a bit embarrassing, but as we will see, our study of the best music lyrics will become in part a study of love, and the things that can be learned from lyric poetry about love. As Socrates tells Glaucon, “Surely music matters should end in love matters that concern the beautiful” or “noble,” (403 c5) as the Greek word means both. And would it not be “the fairest sight, for him who is able to see,” “if the noble dispositions that are in the soul and those that agree and accord with them in the form should ever coincide in anyone” (402 d 1-3). It is extremely difficult for us to speak in prose, as distinct from poetry, regarding the things of love, and a prose writer must, like the interpreter of lyrics, beg allowance for a certain awkwardness. We must for example, speak of “lover” and the “beloved,” or the one loved, using a word rarely heard in American English except surrounding funerals. Our only apology is that if we could find less awkward words or ways to describe these things, we would. And we will try not to be too much like one explaining a joke. As Jung writes, in every love, one is more the container and the other the contained by the love, and to varying degrees.[6] The lover is naturally inclined to be faithful or to stay, while the one loved must be persuaded to stay rather than wander. Sometimes the male or masculine, and sometimes the female or feminine, is the lover, and vice versa, so that the attempt to understand love or any particular love is from the beginning very complicated. Yet in each relation, lover and beloved are recognizable. The male as lover is different from the female as lover, and so on for the one loved. Not all people do love, though most can inspire love in some other. Males who do not love see love itself as effeminate, while women who do not love use the things of love for their economic or household advantage. Love has its own morality, or set of ethical principles that pervade common sense, though none are able to give an account of why these principles are everywhere assumed. The study of love and justice, or justice in love, beginning with the things said in middle schools (that one is only “using” another, etc.) would be a worthwhile undertaking, though we lack the theoretical basis that would make the inquiry possible.

Throughout history, it has been difficult to distinguish true love from the mere animal appetite, since these two occur together, and are even mixed in varying degrees. Romeo and Juliet was once seen as a warning against the excesses of passion. There has always been a tradition that is unwilling to admit the distinction, and so there is a perennial conservative position evident in both religion and philosophy that condemns love along with sex as immoral. The princess is to shut up and marry by the convenience and arrangement of the kingdom. The erotics of Socrates, a study that takes the things of love quite seriously, was always questionably received, and nothing like this is to be found in Aristotle, or anywhere else in the tradition of over two thousand years of human study and writing. Augustine left wife and family for his priesthood. The Christian saints generally see love as a temptation away from the life of dedication to God, and it is only with the poetry of the Romantics and Shakespeare that there is an argument for the principle of the Song of Solomon, that love is the life of the soul in the image of God. True love is a rare thing, though it may occur more often than appears. One would like to think it is possible for each once in their lives, but it is more likely that is possible for no more than one in ten. Yet it is the truth of every love that does commonly occur. It is the participation of two in the Edenic harmony, the same as that entered alone and in fullness by the rarest of singular souls. Romeo and Juliet are like the two hands of a praying saint (Romeo and Juliet, I, v 98-112). Hence it is experienced as a divine condition, and the lover wishes that this joy would fill the earth, or that this love would appear everywhere. The agony and anguish of the lover is that this harmonious state is only temporary, subject to our mortality. Either it grows into something different, in the full partnership of the parents in a household, or it sends the lover on a lifelong journey to find again this lost harmony, and be a sending off through pain onto the solitary quest that is philosophy. Maybe it is sometimes both, though this seems unlikely.

When the highest inspiration hits the California Music scene, for example surrounding the harmonies of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, it is the inspiration to permanent monogamous unity, the lover calling the usually unattainable beloved to walk with them through life and forever, and the wonder of what might be should this happen. The examples abound, but some of the first to come to mind are Neal Young’s “Cowgirl in the Sand.” attempting to persuade her that she is old enough to take one lover and change her name, or Heart of Gold. What happens in a sense in the history of rock, at least in one strain, is that the liberation of sex leads the musicians to discover love. The pioneers are burned by the freedom of the women they seek, and this collision with reality nearly destroys them in some cases, but permanently changes them. But the natural love is the permanent love that is the basis of the foundation of the family, and so stands at the foundation of all political society, if each family is a pillar. The image of the living oak tree in the home of Odysseus, used to make his bedpost, and so it is here that the natural and conventional meet in human society (Homer, Odyssey XXIII, 183-229). The early song Who Put the Bomp asks who it was that put these irrational elements of rhythm into the music (Who put the bomp in the bomp shu etc.):

“Who was that man

I’d like to shake his hand

He made my baby fall in love

With me

The words, he says, “went right into her heart,” and made her say they’d “never have to part,” and continue to set her heart aglow.^[7]

Love is very difficult to talk about, let alone to write about, which is why no one does it, and a part of why the meaning of music is so awkward to discuss. To this day, the best theoretical writings on love are the Greek discussions, which assume homosexual love. Nowhere except Shakespeare has heterosexual love been discussed in any way comparable. Yet the discussion of popular music assumes a theory of love, and this can be outlined or introduced, as the topics emerge. Love pertains to the political or human rather than the animal part of man, involving the passions of the soul rather than only the appetites of the body. In love, the body goes with the soul, or the two move together. One is tempted to say that the soul draws the body forth. This is a great mystery of man. But from our earliest post-pubescent days, growing up as a fashion hippie of the sort that arose in the seventies, even while growing up without much of the traditional society and its limitation of sex to marriage, we always upheld, even as a point of morality, the belief that love, not appetite, justified lovers. We didn’t think of marriage, and no one we knew was married, but the equivalent of adultery for the adult was infidelity to one’s designated girlfriend or boyfriend, which was synonymous with breaking up, because it means definitively that they do not love you. This is in a way the natural opinion of common sense, even to this day. Even while sex is rampant, (if dampened by the STD), it is still common in every junior high and high school to uphold the distinction between the promiscuous, called “sluts,” and the ladies, who are at least more discreet, holding out on their treasures awaiting the persuasion of the male, the winning of her heart. Love has its own persistent and natural morality that is commonly assumed, and heard daily in the things people say, though no one can really explain the assumptions involved. The assumed injustice of infidelity is an example. One is tempted to say, though, that the world is divided into lovers and non lovers, because those “cheating” do not believe in the common assumptions about love and justice, and do not believe that truth is owed. Many love songs are courtship songs, calling the one loved to come and be together. These songs remind of the mating calls of birds, and can be especially beautiful in this way, as clues to the mysteries and mysterious details of human courtship. These may awaken the beloved to certain conditions or ways of life that are possible, or incite admiration. C. S. Lewis, citing Chesterton, writes, “Those who are in love have a natural inclination to bind themselves with promises. Love songs all over the world are full of vows of eternal constancy.” The promise is… “to be true to the beloved as long as I live.”[8] This seems as true today as in 1943, though for many, it is not so. One part of the drama is the triumph of love over the animal appetite for sex, which is indiscriminate, or not attached particularly to the one loved. This drama occurs in the soul and in life, and is visible through some very common symbolic expressions. One simple example will appear if we consider the early video game Donkey Kong, in which a plumber avoids obstacles and ascends levels of a structure in trying to rescue a girl from an attacking ape. The image is similar, or the same archetype is at work, in the story of King Kong. The ape is a part of the hero himself that he meets as if outside himself, and in every common marriage, the struggle for the male is in part to rescue the woman from the barbarity of his own appetites. The slaying of the dragon for the princess is a similar image, and if this work does not occur, happiness in the household will not be possible. It may be that there is a natural hierarchy of the parts of the soul, and a corresponding natural hierarchy of the priorities of human life. So the passion of the plumber is a part of the very “passion” that is behind the genuine marriages, uniting the couples at the founding of families more permanent than those based on more transitory motives. It is on these marriages that the health and stability of the republic, and the strength of the economy, depends. Even the tradition of courtly love failed to appreciate the significance of love to marriage, because marriage was then so highly conventional that it almost never had anything to do with love. To true love, marriage is the assumed goal, but the conventions are indeed secondary. What occurred, though, is that the breakdown of the traditional morality that secured marriage and family was precursor to a divorce rate of over half the population. Nor can our education, concerned only with science and economically useful technology, prepare our characters so that our loves are more permanent. Traditional marriage was like a trellis or buttress that held families together through the tough times, though admittedly it seems to have been too frequent that the households were private despotisms It is not clear, though, whether any society can survive such a circumstance– it has literally never occurred before, even in the worst degeneration of the old Roman empire, and this we hardly notice. As we accepted the appetites, and lost contact with the symbols and images that take us “higher,” the diffuse tendencies of the appetites destroyed the traditional family.

Yet it is astonishing to consider how often the most popular songs uphold the true and lasting love that is the reason for the teaching of monogamy, that we ought have only one beloved with whom we share even our bodies and natural appetites. So many blues songs are about the pain of the lover at the infidelity of the beloved that if one were to judge from the lasting music of the sixties, he would hardly be able to tell that there was such a theme as “free love.” Consider for example The Kinks “All Day and All of the Night,” which begins by shocking the sixties with a date after hours, but soon rises to “I believe that You and me’d last forever/ Oh yea, all day, and night I’m yours, leave me never.” Cream’s “What you gonna do” off Disraeli Gears, or better yet, the many songs of Led Zeppelin based on the old blues songs written from the agony of the lover, such as “Heartbreaker,” “Communication Breakdown,” “Dazed and Confused,” etc…The agony of the lover is the tragic obverse of the assumption of love that leads to the promises of courtship: The experience of the Edenic harmony carries with it the desire that it continue forever, and hence the desire for immortality, though it is first a desire not to live forever, but to be with the beloved forever. Consummation solidifies the attachment, so that separation disturbs the soul itself. Even songs like “Foxy Lady” and “Let Me Stand Next To Your Fire,” where the rock energy is an expression of the goal of sex, ends up saying she’s “got to be all mine,” and “let me stand next to your fire” means something more than intercourse. He wants to be warmed by her hotness, as our more contemporary slang would put it, but this is also to be made alive by her beauty by being near to it. The blues expresses, and helps us to live with, the otherwise inexpressible anguish that can come with love, shared as the somewhat universal experience of our fellows as well, in the blues and in the sad ballads. Similarly, as in the song “Thank You,” it is the lasting love that inspires the most beautiful poetry. “God only knows what I’d be without you,” is the Brian Wilson song McCartney calls his favorite of all songs. The theme can be heard in nearly every love song, calling the one loved to be faithful and true in love. The rock stars seem a bit embarrassed at the beauty of their love songs, somewhat, as it sometimes seems to me, as Plant was embarrassed before Page, and tried to hide the high classical beauty of his lyrics. He seems to get away with it because Page cares more about the sounds, and will tolerate the good so long as it is deep. Somewhat like the majority in matters of romantic fidelity and justice, most music assumes the things also upheld by common sense, on which the sexual revolution quickly finds its limit. The soul sings not about sex but about love, and love has a nature, or is a certain way according to nature. (I have just heard “Take it on the Run” on our local classic rock station, another example). The list is long, and the examples countless, new and old, while the songs about sex are for the most part transitory, and among classics, rare. The heart sings the song of hearts, even when free to sing rather the song of the body and its rhythms, so that the songs which become popular and lasting are or tend to be those which speak to the hearts of the millions. That a true lover would not leave his love to care for their child alone, nor conversely sleep with the neighbor and have her beloved raise the offspring surreptitiously, need not be said, but is assumed. For all our biological-based psychology about reproductive drives and genetic advantage, it is entirely plausible that the things of love are natural to the human soul, and of primary importance in the founding of happy families. The liberation of the passions and the rhythms of sex seem to have coincided with a near genuine cult of love among the poets: “the lovers will rise up (Cohen);” Children of the sun begin to awake (Led Zeppelin).” It is as though the tradition had become ossified, and it was needed to “Rock the ground whereon these sleepers be.”^[9]

Have You Ever Seen The Rain: Creedence Clearwater Revival (1970)

Have You Ever Seen The Rain? – Creedence Clearwater Revival https://youtu.be/ixmvEtQyzvs via

@YouTube

The rare experience of the weather phenomenon of sunshine and rain at once is the particular for this profundity with a perfect lyric structure – often the clue to a song’s meaning. About three times in one’s life, he sees the evening or morning sun shining under a raining cloud, making lightrain.

The four sets of lines are set in a symmetry that helps in reading the song, as the position of a line can then help to reveal its meaning:

Someone told me long ago Yesterday and days before

There’s a calm before the storm Sun is cold and rain is hard I know I know

Its been comin’ for some time. ‘Been that way for all my time

When its over, so they say Till forever on it goes

It’ll rain a sunny day Through the circle fast and slow

I know I know

Shinin’ down like water It don’t stop, I wonder

I wanna know,

Have you ever seen the rain?

“

Comin’ down on a sunny day?

The words are difficult to memorize, because they are difficult to think, until one sees the perfect lyric structure order, centered around “I know.” It is about how the sun comes out after a storm, bringing the wisdom of the past to bear on a present circumstance, in the calm before. There is a conjunction of light and water, in the rare experience of sunshine and rain at once which turns into a vision of the reign of grace and justice.

The rain of sunshine joins the images of light and water into a vision, “shining down like water.” In the second half, his own experience is brought to bear: But in this world, the apparent sun is cold, the weather rough, but it keeps leading souls upward. It is a marvel that it continues. The weather has always been hard, the sun in this world often bringing little comfort., as it has been for his long life. And so it is eternally, as lightrain is an image of the emanating eternal.

So the cycle of sun and rainstorm continues permanently, and the foreseen coming crisis is set in the perspective of eternity. It may be an act of knowledge, if lyric pets are permitted from innocence what for lovers of wisdom would preempt, not stimulate wonder. If the line is “up it goes,” the souls are ascending generation after generation through thew cycle of fortune and misfortune. The conjunction of tragedy and comedy in the image of sunlight rain is reported of Cordelia, the daughter of Lear, whose love for her father the king amid tears is said to be “like sunshine and rain at once.”

On an even more mystic note, Lao Tzu: “Heaven and earth will come together, And a gentle rain will fall.” Precipitation in a clear sky might be caused by the aura of baptism.

· Jun 26

Have You Ever Seen The Rain? – Creedence Clearwater Revival https://youtu.be/ixmvEtQyzvs via @YouTube

From http://Songmeanings.com

Have You Ever Seen The Rain? – Creedence Clearwater Revival https://youtu.be/ixmvEtQyzvs via @YouTube

Notes from Wasserman: Plato’s Republic

Class 1981/ 1983 GVSC

[In progress:]

Using Bloom’s Republic and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with brief modern contrasts at the conclusion, Wasserman furthered the project of Leo Strauss to recover ancient Socratic Political philosophy.

The torch of philosophy is being transferred in this from Germany to America, having come to Germany through France, Britain and Italy, from the Petrarchan recovery of the texts of Byzantium. The Hebrew American immigrants, having seen Germany seared, have yet been able to graft philosophy onto the native Americans, and we are seeing how this takes.

Class notes are difficult for a reader to decipher, and exclude much, including the note taker’s own participation and questions. I enjoy watching myself learn the importance of what is occurring here, gradually beginning to take study seriously in a new way.

Page 1

Wednesday

Dramatic contrast of ancients/moderns

“I see my teaching of philosophy that way”- Irv

Explicit repudiation of the ancients- Machiavelli/Hobbes/Bacon/Descartes

Mathematics- Descartes wipe the slate clear- of truth.

Skepticism endemic- That all must be “proven.”

Certainty- clarity, or else therew is no answer.

Political philosophy (as distinct from political science) (is) dead for all practical purposes.

Is Plato recoverable through modern eyes?

Dialogues.

Start with the ancients in order to see what we said “no” to.

History. But Plato didn’t have history.

Context, yes, but relative to time, no.

What is justice? / What is Plato’s justice?

Through Polemarchus to Thrasymachus.

Lecture Friday January 16th, 1981

All of the dialogue is intentional.

Philosophy and political [philosophy appear inseparable.

[Jean] That none is superfluous. Take it as a whole.

There is no Platonic doctrine as ordinarily understood. [Ken]

Bloom renders in translation.

Concreteness and participation.

ancient/modern. Wasserman: specific characters, questions, answers. Socrates can’t give the answers. We don’t know if there is an “answer.”

Nothing concrete is a what (For man?)

We may have said no to a Plato that is not Plato.

Lecture Jan 19th Monday

It is not clear that philosophy….

Apologos. Speech on behalf of

presuppose- defense of philosophy To break the law

To question. That something has a nature. There

The city does have a case.

? Really. Truly. Best. The ideal

Consent. No one agrees as to what’s best.

“There has not been a coherent discussion on the nature of education in 10 years.” -I. Wasserman

Presocratics/ natural philosophers- atheism

City and poets v. natural philosophers (pre-soc.)

What is human and what is rational seem to be at odds.

Christ the philosopher/poet king?

Poet gives the peculiarly human answer of the city. Convention

Socratic questions. Is rational, (therefore) human.

Athens USA

The poet the natura;l philosopher ballet dancer

Question: How is philosopjhy like the ballet dancer?

Consent involves always a dilution of wisdom. Compromise

-Our standards don’t involve compromise

“For the ancients, the political is second best,but the second best is very very high.” -Irv

It sounds like a doctrine or ideology rather than coming from the inside

…[And then our modern political philosopher says “she shows emotion in public, Plato would says that is not very rational.

Thrasymachus

realizable republic

saying/doing= meaning, therefore write dialogues.

talking/ showing= meaning. Therefore write dialogues.

a) Polemarchus forced conversation

b) Why are people at the Piraeus? New goddess. Torchrace.

An innovation is Socrates (introduces new divinities)

Socrates must effect the gentlemen who are not philosophers; compromise between wisdom and power.

Rhetoric- the art of teaching better way.

Between powerless wisdom and unwise power; the city necessitates dilution.

Consent. You first have to get the approval of consent. Introduces the problem of rhetoric.

To coincide public opinion

Relationship of tyranny and wisdom.

In dilution

People have their gods, their ideas of justice

Necessitates compromise Falsity not necessary Dilution of tyranny. Degrees? truth.

Question of necessary dilution of wisdom

[p. 4 top: Question: What positive (assertions) does Socrates say?]

Tyranny enters into being by appealing to the people. [margin: true that… is it true that]

Falsity, tyranny, is…may not be diluted

Truth wisdom question?

Is it a character of the falsity that it is not diluted i.e., worshiped?

Auth. city ordered to quest.

or quest to city auth [Is the authority of the city ordered to the question or is the question ordered to the citie’s authority]

answer, truth does not mean it does not endanger the city.

He wouldn’t leave Athens to save his life

He is a friend of the city. He expressed this in the apology.

Tomorrow- answer questions in a more responsible way., take the path of Socrates and Allan Bloom.

Thrasymachus: Isn’t that the answer to the question of justice that is most prevalent now?

some kind of garrulous bird

Very nice.

Eric Linus Kaplan

telling me its theory

that the soul is a sphere

but then it corrects itself

it is constantly correcting itself

and says it is not actually a sphere

but we call it a sphere in order to convey

that it lacks any sort of lack or insufficiency

it takes a stick in its beak, it clears the ground with its wings

and starts sketching a system. it draws a circle and labels it

“language” and then on the perimeter it writes “reality”

and then draws another circle around those two and labels that “the

complign sphere of intercessionality” and then it says — look, beyond that circumference

Do you see? Do you see? SQUAWK SQUAWK SQUAWK Do you see?

The wings of the bird are blowing up the dirt where it (he? she?) drew its diagrams the sky

is too dark to see it is an orange red, the spirit…

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