The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees

http://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/anglica/Chronology/20thC/Russell/rus_deno.html

Marx without Marxism. The historical pageant of the 19th century, one as horrific and as tumultous as my own 20th — though with the restrospective historical backwards glance, we see that 19th century horrors were merely dress rehearsals for the true breakdown and resynthesis of the strange 20th.

Nevertheless, the Marxist paradise has still not come. (Unless it is here, in America, where the classes contend peacefully against each other, workers of all economic classes striving for solidarity and the good).

1st Thoughts: The utter strangeness of the American and French Revolution to the peoples of Europe — democracy is not better or worse than monarchy, but it might be quicker — allowing a change of government in one’s own lifetime, affording a peaceful means for a society to change course. Absent this mechanism, one gets, not surprisingly, revolution. If that is the measure, how many peaceful revolutions has the United States undergone since our first? France knows this story even better, having had five republics, two empires, and a monarchy since King Louis lost his head.

2nd Thoughts: The new teleo-secular view of history that begins to express itself after the great Rational Revolutions of Washington and Robespierre. (Right and Left? Perhaps — read Burke next.) The Church is mightily dethroned by these developments, both here and in Europe.

3rd: The absolute horrors of the industrial revolution, where men not knowing of the obligations they owed each other, subjected the poor and unlettered to the most abject existence imaginable. Marxism (and its little brother, Social Democracy) are the only compassionate responses to these deprivations. Today, there are similar deprivations, as Globalism (like industrialism a process that we cannot fully grasp and understand) has created a new grouping of haves and have-nots that has created a seething deadly hell for so much of the world. Bono preached about it at my graduation from university. What new Marxism will save and lift up those brilliant shining masses? (I say to Dvora, to anyone, there are two passions, the only two passions of mankind, poverty and environmental sustainability. In solving one, we solve both, in losing one, we lose both. Bill Gates knows. Bill Clinton knows. I know.)

4th: The power of action and the Dialectic, the Dialectic being the abstracted emergent function of individuals pushed by the historical conditions they find themselves in into acting out the required roles of historical progress. The Dialectic does not occur spontaenously but through the choosing of action. We must act — but once we do our choices are to some extent determined by the conditions of the historical scene: in other words, there is only so much we can do.

5th: Marx and Engels and others were always waiting for the time to be right of the socialist revolution. Marx also conceded that in America, in a democracy, socialism might come about through the use of the democratic processs.

6th: Lenin and the Russians. Marx didn’t expect it, but not surprising that in Russia, where the contradictions of capitalism and the authoritarianism of the leadership were at its greatest, and where the bourgeouise were at their comparative weakness, a communist revolution could take place. The riddle of the USSR has not yet been resolved in my mind — how did it go wrong — what they were missing in general that they fell into despotism — is Marxism wrong at its core, denying the liberal rights of liberty and pursuit of happiness? Against Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness (Jeffersonian stand-in for the more natural property, but which is of course, denied to some) with Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity — the second recognizing the importance of the Social, the Primacy of the Social over the Individual >> here is where the American model fails — we live in society, and hence all bear the social costs of individual action — that said, elevating Mill’s rule to a Primary Ideal needs to be supported, cannot be axiomatic, since if the social world is the emergent concerns of all others, it is unclear why the Individual should trump All Others.

Read Next: The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, by Ursula LeGuin.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/essence/index.htm

Charles Darwin was born 200 years ago. Oh Thunderer, Prometheus, who knocked Atlas from his pedestal and we all fell down with it — the secret magic of many many deaths that gave us ours eyes and arms and peacock brains. Happy Birthday, Mr. Darwin, Turtleman, Happy Birthday.

Here I dance in this everchanging scene, getting my ideas from the newspaper stand, from the liquid crystal display, from the television screen, from the samizdat, from that oh so good and wonderful feeling — can you feel it, baby, can you feel it? Looking down at the plexiglass floor and the deep industrial abyss below — oh yes, oh yes, oh yes, the vertigo is spinning me around —–

I am productive, I am living, I am — I am — Descartes walks into a bar, the bartender says “have you been here before?’ Descartes says “I don’t think so –” and disappears.

Coffee Coffee Coffee Coffee. Hmm hmm hmm.

1. America as a Counter-experiment to Marx’s View of History in Europe. 2. Writing a great history of the 1700s, 1800s, and 1900s – the course of 3 lives >>> American Revolution, French, Russian >>> how we got there. 3. Why start in 1700? What about the Wars of Religion? What about the Reformation? The Past 500 Years >> Dawn to Decadence >> a Liminal Transition State. 4. We are now entering another Transition State >> 5. Reason I wanted to work for a major law firm was so I could be a part of that creation of history. Now, with recession, that Global Dynamic is in retreat, and specifically, I am barred from entering that world >> answer: think global, act local? Or go global? 6. America in the Great Depression turned inward for a generation; existed at a resting state until a generation passed, people looked around and asked why they were being underutilized? America, in the Wilderness >> Nation of Israel in the Desert >> Jesus in the Desert. 7. My own time in the Wilderness >>> Elsewhere, B21 >>> we live our lives in the wilderness 8. The strange state of Mitdasein

Thoughts on:

Geekdom, and the particular attraction such subcultural escapism affords the young middle-class-or-less male impresario who dreams of power and beauty in a world lacking in both. I can dig that, white as I am — the harsher social strictures placed on liminal communities — the strangness of being Subject to yourself, but Other to others —

A paradise, a diaspora, an entire epic history of a people, acted out in the shadows of America’s Monstrosities, the Steel Behemoths of New York City, and the decaying industrial landscape of that City’s outer reaches, in Paterson, in Newark, in the Bronx.

Trujillo, bloody dictator, never knew of. Dark secrets, and the disappeared. Rule by thug. Every society sits close to the precipice — ready to be taken over by those who are willing to die and kill. Got him eventually, surely. But how many others —

And perhaps — legacies of bloodloss persist, webs of gangsterism, structures of thugrule — persist and remain even after the King Spider has been pierced by the True Lance and has fallen into absyssal bottomless depths —

Oscar Wao — and finally — true love — the true love that one day happens — in which we find that we are exceptions, that while we are the rule for most people, to one person we are the exception, that in having lived our lives on the sidelines (as the cliche goes) for a certain span of years, we now find ourselves thrust mercilessly into the heart of the story, and this story is Divine Touched, this story is Real and it has teeth.

Hiding in Honduras — lawyers, guns, and money the shit has hit the fan — every song has its story. every story has its song. lawyers, guns, and money. lawyers, guns, and money. And now the kids — they’re singing about oxford commas. too much education.

by Joni Mitchell

Row and floes of angel hair
and ice cream castles in the air
and feather canyons everywhere
I’ve looked at clouds that way

But now they only block the sun
They rain and snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way
I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow,
Its cloud’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds
at all

The music video stares back at me across the five feet breadth of the living room; the singer called Pink is dressed in an elaborate goth white alice-in-wonderland-dress; she has a white wig with bangs over her eyes and a nose ring and she is in a white room; the song is acceptable, but what I like is the image and the sound hitting me at once. It is rich — a rich experience — and its no surprise that its the quintessential addiction of the postmodern era — sounds and visions beamed directly into our cerebral cortex — who needs LSD when you have three hundred channels with high production values.

In other news, frantic job-seekers have crashed the NYU Law website.

Last night, on my way back from New Haven, I was in a cab driving through Times Square. What is there to say about Time Square in 2009? It is unspeakably beautiful — an image of the future and how far we’ve come — but where? 21st Century. Karl Marx is dead. The Heroes of the Paris Commune — forgotten. The blood of the dead have dried.

There are trees here in New York City. They grow — grow in the lights and the sounds and the smells of New York City. We walk beneath them, not noticing them for the buildings.