I’ve been watching Ken Burns’ documentary on country music (8 2-hour episodes on PBS). I am a bit surprised at how emotionally this series has impacted me. Yes, there is the ache of *nostalgia*. From the roots of the word, there is the image of *homecoming again*. As I approach 87, things remembered become stronger and impact me more. So, reconnecting with long ago memories has a purpose which I believe has something to do with *death.* It has to do with what Orogine said would be my completeness that I must focus on now. I was raised on country music long before I started to turn my attention to classical music when I began piano lessons at 8 years old. After giving some lectures in New York, I was flying home and began to watch the movie Honeysuckle Rose with Willie Nelson and Dyan Cannon. As I watched, scotch in hand, I began to tear up and finally tarted to fully breakdown crying. What was happening was that I was hearing early country singers: Jimmy Rogers, Gene Autry, Hank Williams and others. I couldn’t help myself. The attendant was concerned as were the passengers. Finally, my crying stopped and I sunk into the movie. Later, I told my parents about this experience. My dad said he knew why it happened. He told me that when I was a baby, he would rock me in his arms as he sang along to country songs on the radio. To cure his stuttering. I never knew he stuttered. The coupling of those early voices and the emotional response of crying was strikingly stronger than any conscious memory of those singers would bring about. I think I was hearing what I heired when I was a baby. Research now indicated that implicit memories occur as early as birth to three months and that explicit memory begins to form by six months. So what I was experiencing on the plane was very likely those early voices on the radio and my dad’s singing. This is likely as well, what has brought up so much feeling and emotion and memory in watching Ken Burns’ wonderful documentary.

Thought for the Day

Wednesday, September 3, 2025

The eros of telling from the inside is an art which can contribute to the common good, give birth to alternate futures, and develop in us the moral and ethical capacity to choose wisely. It is especially valuable now as an antidote to the poisonous narcissism that is flooding the world today.

Russ

Saturday Memory
August 30, 2025

I woke up today hearing Bob Dylan singing “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Low Lands.” I first heard this song in 1966. I remember listening to it many times. It was definitely an earworm. I sang along with it. I remember not trying to figure out the meaning of the song, but feeling if I listened enough my attraction to it would deepen into some sense of “understanding” on something other than a rational level. Even then, I considered this song to be Dylan’s most enigmatic song. Now 59 years later, this song has once again becomes something I want to experience without analysis or interpretation at a depth where one simply knows.

Russ

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Thought for the Day
Wednesday, August 27, 2025

What could go wrong when pathology, wed to power, money, and corruption, occupies the most powerful position in the world? What do we need to look out for as signs that this toxicity will begin to lose its pestilential power? As Chris Armitage notes, “Once fascist win power democratically, they have never been removed democratically. Not once, ever.” It follows that the leader of the current scourge will have to leave at the end of term, resign, be impeached, become incapacitated, or die. It seems clear that none of the usual limits to power apply now, or in the coming years. Most every possible curb is proving woefully ineffective. What, then, can one do? When faced with this conundrum, I tend to look at dreams, particularly dreams that come from the depths. What I see there in my own dreams and the dreams of others is that something “wholly unexpected” Is brewing for which, at the present time, we have no inkling whatever. Watch for it.

Saturday Memory

August 23, 2025

It was 1950. I was not yet twelve. On the way home from school, I crossed a field like I usually do, but I tripped on something and when I feel, I managed to land my right hand on a broken glass Clorox bottle. My right hand was bleeding profusely. I think I was in shock because what I did was to look into the deep wound. I was taken up with observing objectively the inside of my hand. I left a trail of blood all the way home. When I got home, my mom was in the bathroom cleaning the shoer stall. When she saw my hand, she fainted. I went next door to get the neighbor’s help. Rocco, the man of the house, saw my hand and declared he must get me to the hospital. I blacked out. He was dressed in his underwear. Nonetheless, he took me and I woke up in the hospital. At some point, my mom arrived. I was into English accents at the time and I shouted out, “There’s my bloody mother!” I thought that was very funny, but she did not laugh. [Note. Rocco was a communist and mentored me to by a young Trotskyite. He had me reading all sorts of Communist literature. But one book he gave me I noticed was different. It was Jung’s Modern Man In Search of a Soul. I kept it. I did not return it. He never asked for it. It was my introduction to Jung.]

Saturday Memory

August 16, 2025

I found myself recalling a post I had made some time ago, which I had titled “Trump’s Ready-mades.”

I finally found it, and I think it is worth posting again. Here it is.

Almost everyone has heard of George Santayana’s famous aphorism, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But there is a corollary observation: “Those who remember best are condemned to repeat their memories.” This causes the most difficulty when something new is presenting itself and one calls upon the past, the sure knowledge of the past, to explain, interpret, and understand the new. With apologies to Marcel Duchamp, I call this using “ready-mades,” as if understanding the new were a matter of taking something off “the shelf of understood things.” The quickness and certainty with which this happens results in a cascade of self-similar memes that provide a strong sense of agreeable understanding of what we are witnessing when the new presents itself.

We are all complicit in such a ready-made understanding. Complicit too in the failure of ready-mades to engage in the more difficult work of “seeing into” the new, for what it is bringing in its wake. This happens at every level of human understanding, from everyday life to the most complex theories of cosmology. We are like the learned church fathers who refused to look through Galileo’s lens.

As an example, consider the popular explanation of the Trump phenomenon as the re-emergence of fascism and seeing the presidential candidate as Hitler. There are many versions of this meme at present; it is widespread and gaining momentum. This is an example of the “extremity” I described in the last post. The use of these ready-made effects even the most astute cultural critics. For example, Chris Hedges writes about “the revenge of the lower classes and the rise of American fascism.” To be sure, he is not using fascism as a simple equivalent of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s fascism as many are doing, but helpfully points out how the symbols of the new American fascism will use stars and stripes and crosses. I don’t want to argue that these identifications are false or even not useful. But the whole idea of fascism is such a ready-made that it potentially blinds us to “something else” that may be afoot in the new.

It is common to treat archetypal structures and processes as fixed. I prefer to see them as undergoing change, often quite disjunctive change, and evolving. Though we cannot see this in any direct way, the observable phenomena may be used to gain a sense of this. One clue of something “new” emerging is the appearance of things that cannot be predicted from what has been. For example, the generation of the work of Picasso, Matisse, and Duchamp cannot be derived from what occurred in art in previous periods. Teddy Roosevelt, when he saw Duchamp’s 1912 Nude Descending a Staircase at the 1913 Armory Show in NYC, declared that the only thing he knew for certain was that this was “not art.” This “new” art was so “scandalous” that it caused riots in Chicago. We can see that these artists were energized by what Jung referred to as a new dominant, which also energized Jung’s inner experiences (and painting thereof) and led to the formulation of the collective unconscious. Jung attended the Armory show, and his paintings would fit well alongside those on exhibit.

If what I said in the last post, that “something unexpected, unpredicted, unknown, and likely uncontrollable has entered into the present campaign,” that “there is some unknown archetypal energy afoot and it is being carried by Mr. Trump more than by any other figure,” is true to any degree, then it is time to work on what this might be without reaching so quickly for ready-mades.

Thought for the Day
Wednesday, August 13, 2025

It is difficult to imagine anyone else who operates so completely by unconscious projection and compensation. Nearly everything he does and is enabled to enact stems from the operation of these two psychological defence mechanisms. Combine this with toxic narcissism in the extreme and you have the makings of a unique leader whose damage to the culture, government, institutions, economy, and the common good (health and well-being) is immeasurable. Such dynamics often underlie the core mainspring of charisma. In both positive and negative ways, this underlies the functions of the “cult of personality.” The cult of personality drives the attraction of followers who “share” The same underlying dynamics of projection and compensation. The rational sensibilities are submerged and become unconscious and unavailable to conscious functioning. This creates a dangerous social dynamic of “herd clustering.” This membership in the herd undermines more fully any rational or conscious function, making the loss of boundaries (to hate, fear, and violence) inevitable. The question that looms large as this process becomes more powerful and consuming is: what is it that would trigger an enantiodromia?

Saturday Memory
August 9, 2025

For my Saturday memories, I don’t “try” to remember anything. The memory must come of its own accord, spontaneously and without any effort on my part. Sometimes, I don’t experience any such memories on Saturday. The memory I had this last Saturday was of my childhood home in Los Angeles. The memory was of my climbing the palm tree out front, and one of the handholds came out, and I fell to the ground on my head. I did not black out, but my skull was a bit flattened where I hit the ground. I have not thought of that experience in decades. But here it shows up now. It is worth reflecting on why it would show up. If I get any sense of this, I’ll post it.

Thought for the Day
Wednesday, August 6, 2025

Ignorance married to power creates phenomena that not only corrupts but is inevitably lethal. Intelligence cannot solve this problem because ignorance serves as a basis for belief and is therefore immune to the corrective powers of reason and rationality. Ignorance as a form of belief disables one from various forms of awareness. Ignorance is thus susceptible to the “threat and unintended consequences” of what it does not experience or what is denied, devalued, and diminished. Ignorance carries a potentially devastating risk, a risk that will always set enantiodromia in motion. But the timing is always unknown.

Russ

Saturday Memory
August 2, 2025

During my 1980 trip to Scotland, I visited Simon McDonald-Lockhart at Lee Castle, the ancestral home of the Lockharts. He made it possible for me to spend some time alone with the Lee Penny. This object (a ruby-like stone mounted on a coin) was gifted to Simon Locard during the crusade in 1330 from a Moorish emir. It was believed to have healing properties, and indeed, it has been used as such, even being requisitioned by the government. In handling the stone, I could feel some strange qualities but could not describe them. I did see images that presented themselves, but they were too fast to track. The Lee Penny was the inspiration for Sir Walter Scott’s novel, The Talisman. Scott was a frequent visitor to Lee Castle, where he found a Lockhart daughter to marry. The memory of holding the Lee Penny is still as sharp as ever.