... and of the CBI

from The Burma Road, Donovan Webster

During one battlefield cleanup along the Tiddum Road, ever since Japanese chose to fake death and one by one ambushed a detachment of Gurkhas collecting corpses for burial, the Gurkhas started to take their own precautionary steps. Pulling out their long and razor-sharp knives, called kurkis, which hung on their belts, the Gurkhas ensured all subsequent enemy troops were dead by slashing their throats before grabbing up a supposed casualty. When a passing British officer saw a Gurkha about to cut the throat of a still-living Japanese soldier who—until that moment—had feigned death, the officer stopped the killing with an off-the cuff order: “You mustn’t do that, Jim,” he said.

Hearing the command the Gurkha turned to the officer somewhat disappointedly, held his blade, and—with a pained expression draped across his face—responded, “But, sahib, we can’t bury him alive?”

The apotheosis of the war in the South Pacific

Charles Crary gets a friendly fire wound and a free ticket home:

We reached the portable hospital, but I had to wait. I was given plasma. I vaguely remember my arm taped to a board so I wouldn't disturb the IV. The mosquitoes saw my arm as a "free lunch" counter. It was black with them. Because of the shock and heavy sedation I just lay there and watched them. During this time my clothing was removed and burned. It had been worn unwashed for about three months. Eventually I went into surgery... I woke and discovered my leg in a cast that let my toes peek out and came two-thirds the way up my thigh. I felt really great. I'm sure that much of my feeling was euphoria that I was out of immediate danger of being shot at. On the second day a crew of twelve porters was assigned to take me to the airstrip at Wau.

On the way we chattered and joked in pidgin. But around 9:30 am I began to feel sick. It started with a knot in the pit of my stomach, but gradually grew into a pain that restricted my breathing. It wasn't too long before I began to think I was going to die. My crew began to run with me. We arrived at a way station that had a doctor. He diagnosed my problem as secondary shock and overmedication of morphine. Relieved, all I wanted to do was sleep. Sometime during the night I was awakened by a sharp pain in one of my toes. It felt as though it were being cut with a knife. I couldn't move the leg because of the cast and weakness. I called out and finally someone came. They found a huge jungle rat trying to eat my toes!

Benny Hinn Gets An Ice Cream

or Constant Prayer

Some years ago, I caught Benny Hinn on the TV. I don’t know why I stopped there when I was flipping around the channels, but I did stop, and Benny was talking about the Flood and what God commanded to Noah—using the same words that He did Adam—“to replenish the earth.” This was the first I had heard of this, so I sat there listening. Hinn was talking about, in Isaiah, where it mentions God turning the world on its side because those who populated it had angered Him, and Hinn, understandably, made the assumption that this must have happened before Adam, since there was no record of it in the interim. At which point, Hinn said: “And do you know who those people were, who were cast into darkness? DEMONS!”

At which point my engagement in Hinn’s story sort of faded.

I did stop to think, though, what it would be like, to be in Benny Hinn’s head. “Hmm. I think I’ll stop on the way home from work at Baskin-Robbin’s. I really like their chocolate—DEMONS! DEMONS TEMPTING ME WITH DELICIOUS ICE CREAM!!”

Hinn makes a demon of everything. And fights with them. It is, in fact, common to fight with demons, turning our temptations into them, struggling around. One does not get very far that way. It is, in fact, very close to idolatry. By making our temptations something to be wrestled with we turn away from God. Simply that. Most temptations come and go. There is nothing really wrong with them, per se. They just are. They come, they go. If one simply lets them come and go, and with that much of an attachment to them, then they press with considerably less weight than any other way. But blowing them out of proportion, it is no wonder we find ourselves so hard pressed to overcome them; we give them their strength.

The late Suleyman Loras, dede of the Mevlevi Order, said once: “There is no reason a relationship with God should be some trying task.” And he was right. There is no reason. The only obstacles in the way are of our own making, the only gauntlet is the one we erect between ourselves and the goal. I trusted God and I trusted my spirit and between the two of them, I felt the one could find its way back to the other if I just let it do so. I found that the more I allowed my spirit control, the easier things went, and the stronger it got. It was a process. Everything is a process. And it is a process that begins with prayer. Being prayerful.

One of the things I came to the hard way was understanding just what prayer was. It wasn’t an act or moment or spoken thing, but the nature of the moment. Various people all across the religious spectrum have, at one time or another, exhorted us, as Paul does, to “Pray unceasingly,” something that, when we hear it, we know is right, even if the concept strikes us as untenable. “Pray at such and such a time and so many times a day” is always a more laudable model, from our perspective, since we can be sure to do so and then go on with our lives without having impinged too greatly on them. Praying “unceasingly,” from our generally narrow and selfish point of view, would be an act that would devour our lives. And practiced as most people practice prayer, speaking and gesticulating a certain set of words and motions, that is true. It is entirely unworkable in that way. Which left me with something of a problem, since this was exactly what the Nimatullahi Order was expecting me to do.

One of the things that I found so interesting, when I began to look into the nature of Sufism and to practice it, was how much it seemed to me to resemble the act of creation (and in particular, the inspirational nature of it) that I had been practicing for a number of years prior to all of this. At that time, I didn’t realize that these things resembled one another because they were the same, but the model of what I did understand about the one was awfully helpful in understanding the other. What I found was that to create, it was best to empty myself in that moment, when I set down to work.

Keep in mind, I had no way of realizing why this worked; it just did work and that was good enough for me. But what I was doing, in those years of practice, practice both writing and impelling that inspiration (and here I would like to interject that that practice was a constant, difficult work. Fulfilling, in its way, but very very difficult. People always seem to want some sort of shortcut, which is impossible. Practicing writing or practicing Sufism, both were enormously demanding,) was becoming a good instrument. By that, I guess a good comparison would be when you are just playing the guitar, freely, and the compulsion of a tune comes on and you follow it along, but suddenly, the note you want to play next is one you don’t know how to perform; knowing how to play every note, every intonation, and that automatically, makes you a good instrument. It allows the inspiration to work its way through you and through the guitar, allowing that inspiration to play you. This was how I approached writing, even though there were added layers of work involved that could not (at least not by me) be handled the same way; as much of the work as I could perform in that way, the better everything seemed to be and the farther along I progressed. All art can be handled in this way—there are particular logistical problems to each discipline, and how each artist handles those problems—but, at the core of it, it is all the same. For me, however, this was art, though, not Everything Else. And how, at the time, it connected with prayer, was still a long way distant.

I clung to that common definition of prayer for a long time. I was engaging in other things at that point, and they seemed to have great and immediate benefits, which, compared to prayer (as I defined it at the time,) prayer was looking to be a bad investment. I took a long look at it, especially the question of its function and utility. It was in that that I realized that everything I was doing was prayer.

Everything has its ground, its aspect, and, as I was moving along, the more I began to realize that the important part of those things is that nature, that aspect, because those are the Names of those things through which we impel their appearance. Prayer is a sacred moment, and the sacred has an aspect: this is what we are called to do, in prayer, to impel the sacred and in that moment, on our knees, surrender to it. The words and the gestures are part of an act to begin that process, but those words and motions have no meaning but what we impart to them ourselves, towards the sacred. Because of this, they can be utilized or dispensed with entirely. To be “prayerful” is to be in that state of surrender, before the sacred. One can induce that surrender, through a “moment of prayer,” but from there, one can maintain that surrender, all through the day. Stopping, throughout the day, to pray again is very helpful to support that state of surrender but not absolutely necessary. Practice makes it possible to maintain it, unceasingly.

What that surrender is is the same as “being a good instrument,” an empty place in which the sacred can manifest itself within you, but only through that surrender. The method and means are very much the same as the “inspirational approach” to creating, and it is easy to see, at that point, how one can approach everything one does, in their entire life, in that way. Praying unceasingly.

Question of Classical Canonism

This grew out of a discussion on the value of teaching the classics in schools.


The problem is less a question of simply teaching the classics than it is of how to disseminate them as a lingua franca of cultural imagery. It is a top down sort of operation, but the problem is that, even where they are taught, they are not circulated among the people as a commonality. A hundred years ago, the community was narrow and common, most of all. Most people’s cultural heritage was based upon the Bible and the classics taught in school and, because of that narrow foundation, it was in that common heritage that the forms of the only available culture were expressed.

The Bible is probably the best classical artifact (in terms of utility,) because it not only allowed philosophical and moral foundation, but it also was a treasure of Proper Identification: the story of Job, for example, is one that virtually everyone at some point or another has identified with, either personally (how alike are my circumstances to Job’s) or by contrast (how much better my circumstances are than Job’s,) and it is in the identification and, in some cases, imitation, of those roles that the most common of people absorb and respond to a classical heritage, even if they themselves are illiterate; it is a classical heritage disseminated from pulpits everywhere. Which means it is a classical foundation to everyone in earshot. It was that common, and that is where the absolute utility of these cultural foundations lies: not in the professors and the students in higher education but circulated among common people.

But for the most part, these common people have become the most mobile generation of workers in human history, starting with the automobile factories, and then, because of the automobile culture, following where the jobs were, and in this a cultural heritage can find no root. Movies and radio and television most of all became our popular culture and, because it is aimed (by the market) to the lowest common denominator, it is not given to the interpretation and imitation by those it is to sustain in the same way the classics were so well suited for.

And it is not even a matter of whether culture is devoid of classicism or stupid either one; it is what it is. The problem is its efficacy in large and most examples to the contrary are pretty indicative as well; almost all classical references are left allusions and have no greater significance than allusions because the larger ground is no more fertile than it is.

The phenomenon when it works is more circulatory than anything else: classicism, as a living force, is both the ground (the foundation) and the ceiling aspired as well, and is nourished both above and below. The problem is, for the common people, like I said, their culture is a pop culture that has no illusions of being anything other than that, which means that the ground in this case cannot sustain the efficacy of a cultural system, classical or otherwise. All the “shots from above” of allusions in popular culture are left just that: occasional (if resonant, briefly) intrusions into an empty status quo, that rarely take root anywhere.

But what a classical culturalism used to do was maintain an “authoritative” range of subject and reference which was, while effective, at the same time, rather narrow as well. The exclusionary nature of that was, while deep enough to be interpreted by those capable of such a thing, it was also all the material one had to work with. As such, in a constant state of dissemination and reconsideration, from above and from below, it was the circulatory nature of a living culture, a culture able to adapt by those cultural artifacts instead of simply enshrining them.

What I think we are rather wistfully wishing to do is to enshrine these classical cultural artifacts in a world that has no particular use for them any more; a world that has drifted in such a direction and for so long there is no real means of rectifying it, because these things grow with us, and cut off from that, they become what they always were, relics with no power. They were instilled of that power by us, at both the higher and lower levels of our society.

The problem is that there is no reason to maintain them outside the “educated” culture unless they can be made relevant to the whole. But for them to be relevant on the ground, that would mean narrowing, rather than widening, the artifacts in our culture, which is probably more than most people (outside the church) are willing to do. By now the horse is already out of the barn.

It is important to remember that the question of efficacy is relative. The Iliad was perceived as a religious text; Homer’s means of severing the prevailing Orientialism down to an absolute profile would be the guiding principle of all classical Greek culture for hundreds of years. And that is just a poem. This was its absolute efficacy, at that moment, when it became a foundation for Greek society at the highest and the lowest levels of that society. The Gospels had a similar effect, as did the Koran. And far from simple references and allusions, these cultural artifacts literally bent societies through the prisms of their sensibilities. This is an awfully effective cultural classicism.

Greek mythology would fall in and out of favor in Western society as time went on, but its resurrection was, while nowhere near its original power, powerful enough because it was anti-social in nature and drew its power from that, until it was finally integrated into the very classical canon that it reemerged to counter to begin with. Only Nietzsche would be able to energize it with even remotely the same glamour it used to exercise on the imagination.

Compared to that—and in the relative curve of its efficacy—no matter how resonant the Iliad is to college students now, it is only resonant because we tell them it is so. (In this way it is like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, whose premiere caused a riot. Fond as I am of it, I never feel compelled to pummel someone while listening to it. But this is the difference, now, between the truly resonant and the canonical resonant. No one had to tell those people to riot. Someone had to tell me this was the reaction, though, at the premiere.) This is the value of authoritative texts (These are Important) but this value is not necessarily intrinsic, and this is no more apparent when the choices for our social value are so wide open with movies and the internet and the plethora of cultural objects of lesser and greater value—how many people, with all these things, can manage to identify with the classics anything other than superficially at best?

Some, certainly, but those are very likely the same number as would always take to them. But beyond that, most of these classical artifacts, regardless of their value, are little more than raw material for popular culture, whose only valuation is popularity. And there is nothing more fleeting than popularity. It is voracious.

Culture

I had given some thought some years back into going into anthropology, but realized that there was a considerable lack in their field of study in the fact that while they studied the culture of whomever it was they were studying— that is, they catalogued it— they didn’t understand it in any visceral way, and did not understand that to grasp a cultural group, it is absolutely necessary for one to perceive on some level the cultural view that they hold. One of the reasons why this is the case is because of the difficulty that this entails, the sheer amount of empathy one has to bring to bear to this task. Another reason is that it is not scientific by any measure. Cultural perceptions are often at odds with the reality of the situation the cultural groups exist in. Since science is supposed to be absolute (unlikely as that is) then bringing in not just one but often numerous conflicting viewpoints that are themselves odds with reality undermine everything that science holds dear. And maybe from their point of view, they are right. Regardless, it still reduces people to numbers and there is really nothing we can learn from a people who have been reduced to a census form.

The reason this is problematic is because a people’s culture is their perception, their shared perception, of everything. It exists in what Ibn’ Arabi termed the creative imagination, the field of imagination on which all our myriad perceptions are laid and are processed into a gestalten All that we perceive the world as. This makes them no less real. Everything is weighed at this point against the standards of our cultural perceptions, ordered by the rules of that perception. Wanting the largest possible overview, the culture’s shared history is here of great import because it allows precedents to be made, patterns to be made to evolve out of those precedents. This is where a cultural foundation is laid and that foundation allows the culture to integrate what occurs now and what will occur in the future without that cultural group having to go through the often painful process of “re-living” what has already happened to them for that integration to happen, or at least without it having to occur in the dark, referentless. Considering how long it was between paradigm shifts, historically, cultures could go a long time without having to modify, dramatically, their cultural perceptions. Ultimately it was only when something of great disruption would force that change, and many cultural groups died as a result of it. That is the problem with cultural perceptions: they are enormously difficult to change, even more difficult to change the longer they have been in operation.

For the native Americans, the tragic results that resulted from the encroachment of the Europeans was ultimately more than their cultures could adequately evolve around; the European culture was diametrically opposite the value system of their own. Had we basically separated them and scattered them from their cultural groups and then integrated them individually into our culture, the American Indians would have been probably in better shape. What we did instead, creating zones in which we intended them to live and in which they could practice their own cultures, really made it worse in the long run because their cultural perceptions no longer worked. To many Indians, the reason why this was so was because they weren’t practising it avidly enough. But a cultural perception is not a car; tinkering with it will not get it to work, getting “original” parts to repair it with will not get it to work more true to its original form. Once the fundamental structure of the culture is undermined, it must change or die. Which is not to say that the Indians should simply jettison their entire cultural heritage, but they should look very hard at their history for what is of use to them now in the world they live in, look at their cultural perceptions for what is useful Now, and put the rest of it either away or practice it ceremonially, that is to say, to recall their cultural past but only on occasion.

To me, one of the best success stories in the US of this very thing is the Scotch-Irish. The Scotch-Irish are themselves not even Irish, as a rule. These Scots who backed Cromwell in his uprising against the throne were, as a token of his gratitude on his success, then relocated to southern Ireland where, one suspects— certainly the Scots did— Cromwell was hoping the Scots and the Irish would wipe each other out and solve two problems at once. The problems in Northern Ireland to this day are based upon this. The Scots, practicality embodied, took in the situation and then decided that they would move to the New World, Pennsylvania in fact, and make a life there. Understand that Pennsylvania is not Scotland or Ireland either one; it was the Great Forest. Their very survival depended entirely on themselves; there was little contact with the Atlantic settlements. To this the Scots depended entirely on themselves and began to adapt to life in the Forest, which they became remarkably adept at. Introduction of the long rifles made a world of difference against the Indians, the relative dearth of food caused an enormous population explosion in their ranks and very soon the Scots were cutting out the states along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, past the Appalachian mountains, almost without any support from the coastal settlements. Their settlements were entirely democratic, more so than the Atlantic states even; the Scots perceiving themselves to be no less in stature to one another but all of them bound together by the precarious realities of their new lives: the Indian attacks and the difficulties of carving out a livable life from the woods themselves.

Ironically, it would be the Scots themselves who would turn the tide against the British during the Revolution. Years of Indian fighting had taught them the guerrilla warfare tactics that they would use with such deadly effectiveness against the British; no doubt considerable amusement could be taken from the looks on the Brits’ faces when they realized it was those sorry bastard Scots they had run off all those years before who were cutting them to pieces. (Certainly the Scots themselves have never been known to forget a grievance; one would think they raise their children on it like mother’s milk.) It would also be the encroachment of the Scots on Spanish unsettled land in the West that would force them to start their colony program in Texas, for the expressed reason of keeping the Scots out; anyone other than them was apparently better than the alternative.

Already you can see a considerable cultural evolution in the Scots in the US in a very short span of time. Fundamentally, the Scots had not changed; they were still the pig-headed, ultimately expedient bunch they had been back in Scotland, even, but virtually everything else about them had changed. They would do so again. Balked against the prairie lands of the West that were beyond their ken and the mounted Indians there that they had no effective means of fighting, the wave of population expansion would stop there and, with the republic and then state of Texas giving away property to all comers, they would turn south, into the woods of east Texas. However, it would not be too long before that would not be enough. Two things would change that. One was the settlement of vast acreage of lands in the prairies and the plains where the only means of survival was the use of range cattle. Learning from the vaqueros the means of this trade, the Scots would learn to live on horseback. For those who did, the cultural shift was an enormous one. The Scots had always dug roots before. Maybe when the time came and they decided to leave, they would leave those roots by the wayside, but they would just as quickly dig in elsewhere, wherever they were. This new culture was a rootless one, ranging far afield on horseback; their entire culture would change once again. With the introduction of Colt’s patent revolver, this culture would carve its roots out over a widespread area as they brought the war to the Indians instead of merely reacting to them. Once again, the Scots themselves, fundamentally, did not change, but everything else about them did. And we are only talking about a couple of hundred years for these two enormous changes in their culture to take place (considerably less for the second change.)

Placing this as a template against other cultures here and abroad, it is easy to weigh how effective they ultimately are. The Scots dragged their culture along with them like an old trunk. What they could use they used, expediently. What did not cost them anything, they continued. Everything else was dropped along by the wayside as they made their way across the US.

As an aside, I think if you look at how so many very distinct cultures that came to the US find themselves cultureless now is found in immigration. When the Irish came along, they were reviled by the people already here. They would ultimately have to integrate to become viewed as “Americans” (the old “You got to go along to get along” philosophy so prevalent in the US) and that meant either giving up their cultural practices or at least do them when no one was looking. In these days when we celebrate the culture of Ireland, it is easy to forget that it hasn’t been all that long since the Irish began to practice it themselves here in the US.

When these immigrating cultures would drop their heritage in the face of the New World (how actually useful they would have been here in questionable anyway) they followed the idea of an American culture that was, itself, a fairly new phenomenon. With the cascade of changes in this country in the 20th Century, one coming on the heels of the next, any culture begins to look ineffective to keep up with the changing times. There has been little time to drop any roots when, over and over again, the technological and political realties wash them aside. Expediency expects a mobile and rootless culture because the gravitation around the changes in fortunes (from farm work at the beginning of the century to factory work in the middle of the century to the fluctuation from city to city as they become centers of industry based on technologies whose centers, themselves, wax and wane from one city to the next) and the only culture that is left to us is what we see on the TV, in the movies, because one can collectively engage in them anywhere in the US. They become the lingua franca of the American culture. So much the worse for us.

Sympatheia And Surrender

“At the moment of creation, the musician faithful to the art of improvisation chooses a certain path by selecting various intervals in harmony with his mood. Until the sounding of the first note on stage, this path is a secret to the conscious mind of the improviser and what is desired during the concert is only known to the unconscious. In Eastern mysticism, this unconscious is also called “the clear heart.” The more meaningful, clear, and active the unconscious is, the more attractive and beautiful the spiritual mood of the creation becomes.

“Love and loyalty to the ideal of improvisation and secrets of creation are one’s principle and one’s guidance. At the time of creation, one is nothing but an instrument and one maintains respect for this creation by being modest toward it, hence, this art in the East is called ‘inspirational.’ All one has to do is to let one’s feelings flow freely in the currents of truth, the searching rays of God. Love of God, which is one’s absolute love, has been and will be the most complete path to creation.

“The reunion of the artist with the beloved on stage warms his soul and guides his creation. In this path the melodies and rhythms create a feeling of zekr (the connection of an individual, in solitude or as a group, the supreme love of God by the use of music/rhythm) to the point that the performer and even the music disappear and only one thing is left, monotheism, which the old mystics have also called ‘oneness of existence.’”

-- M. R. Lotfi

I happened to catch Ravi Shankar on a documentary today. I didn’t see much of it; I really don’t care that much for Shankar’s music (I realize that people seem to think that if I like Indian music I must, ergo, like Ravi Shankar, but that isn’t the case.) However, a great deal of what I saw was him talking, primarily about his baba (master) and about the act of creating music itself.

When he was a young man, Ravi was apparently something of a wild boy. His baba had told him that he was like a butterfly, flittering here and there and he was never serious about anything. “You have so much talent,” his master had told him, “I would love to teach you, but you will not put your mind to one thing.” He told him that if he wanted to be serious, if he wanted to focus, to come and see him. Ravi was still entranced with “entertainments” as he referred to them— everything, no doubt, from the cinema to girls and parties— but Ravi said: “I was filled with turmoil.” Apparently, he was already creating (he was talking about a dance and music piece he had composed when he was 15, which was before he became a disciple) but that didn’t seem to be making things any better.

This is an interesting point he is making here: it was as if he had expected his creative endeavours to somehow clarify things but they were only making them worse. At some point, however, he did leave the city and go out to the master’s house. It was, he said, enormously difficult. He had to give up everything for it. There was nothing anywhere around, nothing to spend his time on but his practice; the master himself was a tyrant to them, but Shankar’s great love for this man is evident in his every mention of him. “I thank God that Baba was sent to me,” he says.

I’m not sure what all Ravi had to do while he was there, but practicing music was the lion’s share of it. Sitting there at the master’s feet playing. “The master spoke of musical things as if they were spiritual things. That this was a religious act.” Here we pull away from the master and go to Shankar himself playing and he is saying that playing music is not Of The World, not in this manner. This, he says, is the spiritual (and correct, one assumes) use of music. “Singers have it easy, because they can use their own voices to sing the beautiful hymns to Krishna, but a musician must get inside the instrument to do this, he must get away from himself. These notes are just sounds.” It is up to the musician to turn those sounds into proper notes and inspire them with the proper feeling. One must lose oneself in it, not even considering what the next note is that one is going to play. “If you’re only concern is to display your talent, to show the audience how fast that you can play or something like that; that is not spiritual music. That is just entertainment.”

He describes this state in which one creates as a beautiful pain in him, drawing a circle around his heart. It is as if someone else is there that you are playing to and you cannot seem to communicate properly, cannot seem to attain properly, and so this pain in the heart. And this is why the sadness in the music, but “It is a beautiful sadness,” he said, “It is a happiness.”

What Shankar is describing is creating as a spiritual practice. I said something one time about Inspiration as being divine, but by the time it gets to us, it is merely inspiration (small caps) and must be inspired by our own spirits for it to achieve anything like the initial Inspiration. He is also describing a sympatheia, his trying to communicate his inspiration to something or someone which he (accurately, I think) equates with God, but God, in revealing Himself to Shankar, is communicating to him.

I have been saying for some time that I thought writing was, to me anyway, a spiritual practice. And what I mean is this: when I am writing, I am allowing something to work through me. I think this is common for all artists, to some degree, but I have long ago consciously removed myself from the process. There is no I when I am writing. I have been practicing writing considerably longer than I have anything else, and I have attained a state where I can just step out of the way. I am allowing this something to work through me, and that is no different from meditation or prayer in that matter. In fact, really, there is no difference there at all— it’s just a matter of process: means and ends. And this seems to me to be a perfectly natural state of affairs; I mean, what did God put me here for if not to write?

(I think this is why so much of what is called art in this day and age is so ineffective. They do not seem to have removed themselves in the process of their work and I mean quite literally. The basic description of current art (1960- to the present) is seeming to try and communicate “What I Feel.” Which is myopic. You are in the way. How can you possibly allow something through you if all you can conceive of is yourself?)

There is something that Shankar mentioned above, about the music and the turmoil in him. His creativity, I mentioned, was not clarifying anything. I think this is a good point. If, as an artist, God put one here for this purpose, then it should clarify things, properly used. It is a large part of who one is and through it, it only makes sense that it is capable of clarifying things, of unwinding the turmoil in one’s heart. Which does not necessarily mean being at peace, because by Shankar’s own admission the act of creation is a beautiful sadness, but it does not add to that turmoil; it makes music out of it. It changes it to spirit.

The Rule of Substitution

LIKE SOMETHING PROPELLED out by terrible force but soon drawn down at the hand of entropy, progressing only by its own failing momentum and nothing more, the Roman Empire persisted long after anyone was there to direct it, or anyone to mourn the lack of that direction. The public offices withdrew from any meaningful contact with the society they were there to govern and the public itself— left without a government in even the loosest of terms— continued unaware, carried on with the day-to-day business without any direction whatsoever, taking a cue from the elected that things had, in the end, run their course. One would think in such circumstances that an insurrection of serious proportion would arise to fill the void left when the offices of the government went unfulfilled, that seeing the opportunity they would rise up to take the reins. Or that Rome itself would splinter and fall apart as there was no one to smooth over the friction so often apparent in as diverse an empire as the Romans had created. No. It merely continued, flagging along without wind or rudder either one.

Because of the Spectacle.

The Spectacle is the creation of the empire, any empire, something unfurled once perhaps out of nationalism or religious impulse at some obscure moment in the past, but ultimately used as a tool of the empire itself to draw the ruled into the fold, to allow them a measure of the wealth— the wealth, at least, on display to their impoverished eyes— of the State. It is a tradition cut from whole cloth that by its colored flags and buffoons, its displays of fire and high reveling music hypnotizes the public, lures them into the mindless and otherwise pointless magical snare of the carnival, the festival, the saturnalia. It is the parades, line after line of the Empire’s might marched through the boulevards and central avenues. It is the music and the mummery plays, the costumed girls ripe in the summer twilight there for the dance.

The casks are opened and any discontent or questioning soul is invited to drink, drink along with your fellows, man. Take a girl and dance, dance with her until the nightstars spin and she’s lost in your own bed where the wine is spilled and stains the sheets. This is no time for shouted questions at the steps of the Forum, questions of the direction or intentions of the State, for this is the answer, swept out large into the streets. In one act the Spectacle is both answer and action: the fruits of the public labor as directed by the empire are returned upon all, multiplied in a splendor of jugglers and dancing girls. The benevolence of the State manifest in the streets where fresh flags waver in the breeze and the murals are unveiled while the children run the avenue and the band plays on. It is in the Spectacle that the laws— laws of necessity so the machinery of the Empire might be allowed to work most efficiently and consequently best serve the ruled— are laxed to the point of chaos in a grand and empty gesture by the ruling class.

By the time the late years of the Roman Empire had come to pass, the Empire itself had exhausted nearly every holy day and celebration of every civilization it had conquered. Festival days took up the better part of the year, and the multicolored tassels and laurel crowns faded in the streets, never taken down for lack of any week in which a celebration did not occur. Yet even with this, the public wanted more, and the State was of course happy to provide. It was out of political necessity and public favor that the Circus Maximus was built, the games begun. For the State, the games— the ultimate spectacle paid for with the blood of dissidents and religious subversives torn apart on the coliseum floor— were a political deterrent and popular entertainment in the most convenient of arrangements. And for the public, at last, they had found the lowest common denominator of the Spectacle, the Spectacle in its purest form: the primitive fascination of and the violent portrayal of death that, to a country without hope, a society in denial of its own manifest decline, was perhaps the only thing of any lasting reality to them.

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It was truly a spectacle par excellence, the marriage of the prince and his bride. The second most watched television broadcast in history. Closet monarchists and women who had with a young girl’s closed eyes dreamed of the storybook prince glued themselves to the TV to watch what was described, again and again, as a fairy tale wedding. Here perception and fact come into conflict, but not for very long; Diana Spencer was no more than a royal herself, destined as she was since birth to marry another of her class: a duke, a prince, a king. There is little of a fairy tale to something arranged, even loosely, by the social engineers of the ruling class. Such a fairy tale demands at least the illusion of some connection made between the rulers and the ruled. That Diana Spencer was considered a commoner, or at least an honorary one, something bestowed upon her by the commoners themselves, was itself a matter of perception, all the more to assist the fantasy that this was, in fact, a Spectacle of monumental proportions.

Granted, it needed little help. Down from tapestries and stained glass high as the cathedral arch, the cascades of flowers and crepe virginal white: the wedding was a ceremony of such pomp and proper performance that it dazzled even the eyes of those used to such things, the royal watchers already jaded by the countless weddings of other, lesser dignitaries. To those less familiar with the proceedings, it appeared nothing short of magical. Which is the purpose of the Spectacle: the magical obfuscation of something left unnamed by the audience, some lack in themselves that the Spectacle and the purveyors of the Spectacle have no answer for. Or no interest in answering; it all amounts to the same thing.

The second most watched television broadcast in history. Upstaged in viewership only by the funeral of this selfsame princess, whom we buried having killed after driving her through the spits of public scrutiny. Two acts of the Spectacle, the opposites of the poles, and driven from pillar to post: the substitute.

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It is only in the latter Twentieth century that we find as sophisticated or complete a Spectacle as one in which there is no audience at all. The term “audience” suggests a participation on the part of those that witness the Spectacle, at once part of the proceedings but also set apart, watching but influencing what is portrayed out before them. With the dawn of the television, this is no longer even necessary. This new Spectacle portrays itself virtually without referent to those that watch, its image cast across the distances conjuring nothing more than an illusion of itself, without flesh, blood, breath.

Illusions bind within the mind. What is seen apart from them does not subdue or refute the illusion at all. Everything is perceived as real when illusions become prolific, walking about in broad daylight undiminished by reason or by the waking eye. What is broadcast over miles of airspace is perhaps the greatest of illusions as it has by its very nature usurped reality itself.

Ultimately it is in this profusion of images that we find the foundation of this new Spectacle, the mechanism that enables it as it does to deceive with far more efficiency than the Spectacles of old, the festivals that played upon the restrictiveness of the State by allowing a free reveling in the streets or the gladiatorial games that captivated the denizens of a dying empire with the most base of preoccupations. The substructure of the new Spectacle, what allows the patently false to be perceived as real, is the nature of substitution, the tendency towards the substitutive act.

Throughout history the masses have tended towards electing— perhaps not consciously or even willingly, but electing nonetheless— a representative from within the ruling class, electing from those that by virtue represent something of the masses’ own nature, a nature either recognized by the masses or wishfully wanting to recognize in themselves. It is in this tendency for substitution that kings and clergy have found the legitimacy of their offices and the powers thereof, a tendency born out of an illusion itself that in one man or one small group of men there resides a better grasp of matters, a more sound wisdom for governance, a greater relationship with god than is found in the masses themselves.

Yet in the age of the new Spectacle, the relationship between the witness to the spectacle and the substitutes elect has reached a level of intimacy unknown and unguessed from when whole religions were raised up out of nothing and kings of no legitimacy were placed upon the throne by nothing more than the consent of those that would be ruled. For now, bedazzled by a spectacle of which there is no reality at all, nothing to hold in the hand to test the weight of its existence, the witness finds its own substitute not as a representative for the group but for the individual itself— not just one but numerous substitutes each to surrogate but one aspect of the Spectacle for that witness. In the newscaster who most confidently brings the pertinent gossip of the day, in the actress most lovely or the actor most courageous. In the politician who offends the least or lies the best. Even the gladiatorial games are replaced with another game its nearest incarnation, of behemoths marching down a contested field, clashing over a prize that cannot be redeemed but once the enemy’s territory is claimed. All that is missing is the blood.

And the substitute for the blood is money.

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It should come as no surprise that even the most fundamental of elements are open for substitution— material such as blood and sweat and fire, all the things that allow magic to function in the world— in a society in which the currency itself is meaningless. A truly representative currency, with no intristic value but instead valued by consensus: money is the ultimate substitute, its value endlessly adaptive to what best suits the market it has to bear. In times of great industrialization, it is the currency of production. In times of war, it is redeemable in blood.

To the beauty contest winner, we give her the crown and the money— the value of her beauty. To the victims of a great catastrophe, we give rice and money— the value of their suffering. And to the professional athlete, we give a ring (the jewels of the realm) and the money— the value of a war of substitution, the value of the blood no one spilled.

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But money is only paper, and images but illusion. Cast apart from themselves, allowing the substitute by its nature to be perceived as more important, more real than those it represents, the life of the witness becomes more and more fractured from reality, less corporeal, eventually fading from existence. The hollowness of living becomes all the more acute when seen against the prosperity of those called to substitute. And those imaginary lives become all the more fascinating. The substitute becomes not only our representative in the Spectacle but our alterego, their lives a salve by proxy against the emptiness of our lives drawn away from the world by the color and drama of the Spectacle itself. It is with our money that the substitute lives the lives they do, the lives that make our own so pale in comparison, and therefore it is their lives that we are ultimately entitled to.

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They wrestled him down out of the crowd of television reporters from which he had stepped firing his revolver. After the gunfire and the screaming in the streets, there was one man seriously wounded, two others down, and a President winged but otherwise unharmed. His press secretary James Brady’s blood colored the pavement, a hole in his head. Brady ended up his life in a wheelchair. Reagan was elected to a second term.

The authorities soon discovered the would-be assassin’s name— John Hinkley Jr.— and what they found upon opening his apartment would be a trail of succumbing madness that left the news reporters perplexed and the judicial system with nothing else to do but declare the man insane. John Hinkley Jr. had become obsessed with an actress from a film nearly five years old at the time, from when the actress herself had been nothing more than a child, and it was finally this obsession that led him to attempt to murder the President of the United States. So prevailing wisdom would describe the pitiful events that surrounded Hinkley’s slow descent into insanity: obsession and spurned affection— all his letters to this little girl had been left unanswered and to prove his love for her, he undertook an assassination attempt that would make him famous, more worthwhile in her eyes than the man that he was.

But John Hinkley was not in love with the Jodie Foster that he sent his letters to; he hardly understood that there existed a fundamental difference between the child prostitute she had played in Taxi Driver and the college student she was at the time. John Hinkley had become glamoured by imagery, enamored with an illusion, and when the pain of his inability to claim that illusion and draw it into reality became intolerable, he turned to destroy this barrier between the fictive and the real as best he could, not by destroying Foster— whom he believed he loved— but by destroying a greater illusion than even she was: he turned to murder the President, an actor himself. Here Hinkley’s madness is irrefutable: on one hand he rose up to bring down the very archetype of substitution as if this would bring the whole wall down; on the other hand he wished to, by his action, become as those illusions were, to join in the game, in the Spectacle, by his own notoriety.

Simply because he was not pure in his intention, it does not mean Hinkley’s act was not an absolutely accurate one. Plato would have seen the dichotomy in Hinkley’s action, all the while sadly shaking his head and muttering about the dangers of the proliferation of images. Hinkley was an iconoclast.

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Images are but illusion, without breath, without blood. It is blood that staves off the fading away, the loss of existence in the wake of the substitution. Blood is the truest of currencies. It is the integral element of ritual. Without blood, rituals are mere mock rituals, and mock rituals nothing but the Spectacle itself not yet come to fruition. The lack of blood kills and so it is that the witness turns upon the substitute.

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Perhaps there is nothing more modern than the royal family, themselves now nothing but a vague reminder of a time when blood meant something, when the Spectacle itself was merely a means and not an end unto itself. Though oftentimes, to the outside world, it must appear as something of an appendix, in a country still resonant with its own past, the royal family forms an important piece of the foundation of society. Shorn of any authority and sequestered away, they are like the straw dogs the Chinese used in festivals of long ago: brought out during the proceedings and carried in a place of reverence during the parades, the straw dogs were then cast aside once the festival was done. Here is the substitute turned as a tool for the masses, not the other way around, a collection of substitutes whose very purpose is as functionaries for the country, to christen the ships and master the parades, to die for the land.

Yes, to die for the land.

Attis and the Corn-kings crucified, Zagreus Dionysus torn apart every year: it is in the divinity of kingship that he is a sacrifice as well. In the dark jungles of Central America, the priest-kings danced a dance in blood to speak to the Otherworld, to strike a balance between the two worlds and bring prosperity to his people. But once the land failed, the temples were burned, the cities abandoned, and the king was slain near the altar. His blood seeped the stones. Osiris was ripped asunder, thrown into the Nile. It rises every year, laying fertile silt upon the earth as it recedes. It is the ultimate duty of the king to die for the land because the king is its very substitute, and it is in consideration of this that we find that ritual— that which describes this affinity between the king and the land— is itself the true incarnation of what the Spectacle means to represent.

The Spectacle was brought forth out of political expediency, out of the State’s disinterest in addressing the concerns of those that it ruled. A smoke-and-mirrors diversion, the Spectacle was a means to trumpet the propaganda of the empire and reinforce the illusion of a patriarchal bond between the rulers and their subjects. In order to create this diversion, the State plundered the rituals of the masses, shearing any meaning from them as those meanings often had connotations of a time when the State did not exist, or perhaps existed in some other configuration— ugly reminders of other orders that had existed and might possibly exist again in the future if not kept under control.

It is a popular misconception that ritual is only an invention of the society, something easily sloughed away like a snake’s skin in the summertime, something best left with the other relics of the often embarrassing past. Quite the contrary— it is the society that is the invention of the ritual, the ritualistic act. In ordering the lives of a scattered group of people bent on their own individual ambitions, the ritual brought them together as one unit, perceiving the world with a common conception— a conception born out of the ritual— and it is only as a single unit that society can begin. But ritual is a serious art form, perhaps the most serious mankind has yet invented, centering as it does around the sacrifice— the great substitute— and the blood shed by everyone in the circle that the ritual creates.

It is that circle which surrounds the charm-king. It is that circle that ordains his legitimacy to the throne, because those that make up the circle have chosen him as their substitute, seeing in him something that is the epitome of the group, the divinity of the sect. Just as it is that circle that will draw around him with their knives drawn once the crops fail, once the water dries up, once the charm of his rule is soured and threatens to destroy the society made. And it is his death, the guilt his death induces, that will strengthen the bonds of that circle, that group, that society.

Once the ritual was taken away from the Spectacle, once the blood was removed from the act, the substitutes were no longer reined in by the sacrificial knife and the reproduction of images grew at once out of control. From a necessity of society, the substitute becomes the bane of it, a force rampant and bent on the proliferation of itself even unto draining from those it is a substitute for the life the makes them genuine, to make of them nothing but ghosts and images themselves.

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Out of the wreckage of the car in that Parisian tunnel, one might cast back over all the shattered pieces that stretched back in space and time, seeing everything as it had begun to splinter and break apart soon after the marriage vows were said until it had, eventually, destroyed itself in materiel. All those moments alone in her bedroom at the Palace weeping as she felt the very seams of the world coming undone: that feeling was the Inevitable already stitching a place for Diana Spencer, a place in history written out in blood and broken glass on some French thoroughfare, the needle working the fabric the instant she stepped outside of the role she had assumed.

A managed life and one of privilege, Diana Spencer had been groomed for the role of substitute since birth, though not to the degree, certainly, that her husband-to-be had been groomed, but it was truly with eyes wide open that she took the role of substitute, of the narrow, suffocating life of a princess without any jurisdiction and of a woman kept not only by her husband but by her country at large. It was a role of very few lines and of movements even less, but she took it as she took the man as her husband there before the eyes of millions tuned onto their television screens.

Perhaps it was in her lack of preparation for the part, in having been raised in some cozy backalley of the social circle expecting more of an understudy's share than the leading role, that the illusion of being separate from the part itself had crossed her mind. But once it had settled there, that notion, it only grew until it was a fact and a fact that at every turn set her at odds with her new family and the country itself. She drew away from the role never realizing that the role was real, as real as her old life had been.

When Diana Spencer broke with the royal family, when she began to act separate from the role she was assigned to play as a substitute, that was when the public interest in her began with an almost malicious intent to hound her out of the very holes she had gone to hide in. Exposed as she was outside the frame of the Spectacle and her role in that Spectacle, the damned curiosity of those she was called to substitute for like the Erinyes followed her every step of the way, fascinated as they were at her life and her behavior so out of keeping with the actions her performance supposedly allowed her. That the preoccupation with this woman who had shrugged off the role she had been bound to play eventually killed her comes as no surprise. That her death has not decreased the interest in her is almost a matter of form.

She was never real to those who watched her anyway.