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The following entry false-starts with a drone about a few currently popular systems of government. It is a dull topic and I regret wasting my mind on it, but I won't delete it or provide any way to skip past it because I need something to rub my snout in, so that I learn to NOT do such bad deeds next time.

Dear diary,

So you got these types of government: communism and socialism. My mom stopped by the other day and we chatted for a while (I’m not on The Social Network, so the only way anyone can communicate with me is face-to-face, or via Twitter or Tumblr, or on the telephone, or you have to roll down your car window), and I asked her why the members of her generation (The Baby Boomers) are so afraid of those types of government aforesaid, whereas the subsequent generations, like my own, born in the late 70s to the early 80s (The Nameless Generation, which got smashed in the hinge when the door closed between the adjacent ages), and the so-called Millennials (those who resulted from the Y2K fiasco, which, you’ll recall, was when all the computers thought that 1999 should be followed by the year ZERO, thus causing virgin births to flood Agape Land) are cool with everything. My mom said that she has personally met refugees who have fled their socialist countries, and these people tell horror stories about their governments. And I said: Like what? And she said that the people who live under those systems cannot get the supplies that they need. And I said: That sounds like life here in the U.S. And she said…

I don’t want to finish relaying the conversation. Who cares about one woman’s opinion, or the opinion of her son. We found out the supplies that her people lacked were the same that are lacking right now for people who live in X or Y of our States. (Not ALL States, just some; not to mention “unincorporated territories”.) And what has this lack to do with any system of government? Many people like my mom believe that the “-isms” that focus on healthy COMMUNE in a country, and a country’s healthy SOCIAL functioning, rather than placing all care simply on CAPITAL—the love of which my mother’s own sacred scripture calls “the root of all evil” (I Timothy 6:10)—cause ugly things to happen. I asked my mom: Name the ugly things that come from these two systems. And my mom named many things, all of which I agreed are ugly. So I said that IF (big IF) these things are truly the goal of such systems, then I declare myself to be wholly against both socialism and communism. But I do not see how the definition of either of those systems would ever lead to any ugliness – here, I’ll define them by copying results from the most popular search engine, which cannot lie:

• SOCIALISM = “the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.”
• COMMUINISM = “all property is publicly owned, and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs.”

When I look at the raw idea of each classification, it’s hard for me to see where any ugliness might follow. In contrast, I’ll check out the definition of my mother’s preferred system, from the same infallible resource:

• CAPITALISM = “a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.”

What could go wrong? I ask ironically. Yet my mom trumped me: she said that my two beloved forms of government must populate their bloated bureaucracies with human beings, who tend to become corrupted by power. This is true, I admit. Not for one instant do I honor the corrupted bureaucracy of any government. But does capitalism solve the problem of bureaucracy? How? By privatizing everything? But if bureaucracy is ugly because its officeholders grow corrupt, then how can the officers who populate the private corporations of capitalism avoid becoming similarly corrupt?

So I think that my mother inadvertently struck upon the problem: The ugliness of ANY form of government stems from its having a non-transparent, which is to say PRIVATE power structure; because, even if such a structure is doing a beautiful job this afternoon, when tomorrow comes it might turn ugly, and then there will be no way for the country’s citizenry to mend the machine – for that’s the definition of a privatized system: only its tiny group of owners can change it.

I guess this is why we keep hearing so many leftists in the U.S. calling themselves Democratic Socialists. Add democracy to the notion of socialism, and you’ve got a good start – you’ve eliminated the tendency toward a closed-off bureaucracy, and now maybe the system can operate according to its definition. Modern minds realize the problem with former instances of socialism or communism was that the bureaucracy was not transparent, so when it began to grow corrupt, the people could not stop it, for nobody but the corrupted bureaucrats themselves were allowed to see (and thus alter) the inner workings of their machine. The same goes for U.S. corporations: Who can know their mysterious ways? Nobody can change them, not even by publicly voting. Hence capitalism has proven that it can outdo both socialism and even communism in ugliness on earth.

But the point is that any of the above systems will do just fine, so long as the system is made transparent (NOT private; so that citizens can detect any corruption and solve it when it occurs), all people can participate in the voting process, and the elections are fair—that is: 1 person = 1 vote; as opposed to: 1 dollar = 1 vote.

*

I hate that I fell into the above pit of political apologetics. I don’t think it benefits or pleases anyone to hear me tame my wild fancies to such subjects. Only freethinking itself is important. Experiment with words. Many people have said it: Writing is like prayer. You don’t do it in hopes of getting rewarded economically or even with critical acclaim: for the critics are always wrong about their present age, and no one ever gets paid to do work for futurity – how could you pay someone to give the future what it wants? One would have to know the future in order to compensate a writer for pleasing its inhabitants. The only way that a moneyman could recognize even chartable excellence is through a lucky guess; so if you strive for unprecedented excellence, don’t expect a paycheck. Do something else if you need to “make ends meet.” Only the very rich and the very poor should write. But I say that last remark only for its symmetry: in truth, I say: write your heart out, whoever you are. Because the finest writing comes from even television scripts, or the backs of cereal boxes, or museum brochures, or online status updates, or even our current president—sometimes he says things that are really beautiful; and he has an alluring cadence of speech, and I like how he moves his hands when he’s making a sale. (I’m trying to find attractiveness in places that I’d normally consider repulsive.) Yes, writing is like prayer. Where is the modern shaman? It’s the writer. And I say that straightforwardly. I’m maybe too enthusiastic about writing, but I think it’s like the “missing link” between humans and gods. (Nietzschean supermen, overbeings, what you will… I just mean the next big improvement that deserves a new classification.) If the scale goes from ape to man to god, then witnessing a modern mortal take up writing is akin to, back in the semi-human days, seeing a previously grunt-only ape begin to articulate words.

[Ouija-speech of Psyche, from James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover; III: Scripts for the Pageant; section “&”: “The Middle Lessons: 5 (The Lady of Sandover)”.]

But when a soul tells me the behind-the-scenes thoughts and events that led to her becoming a writer – this type of knowledge is far more interesting to me than if she had told me about her pre-birth life. For, if we take “prophet” not to mean simply “fortune teller” but realistically a “proclaimer of energies,” which is what I take a writer to be, then the story of the transfiguration of a soul from human to prophet has this advantage on the story of reincarnation: writers can lie about their memories.

But I want to give two more quotes, by way of remarking on the first lines of that passage above, where God Biology and Mother Nature/Psyche gaze into the eyes of what I think of as that link, which we so dearly miss—the first ape infused with promise of humanhood—and the deities experience love-at-first-sight; and, as the text says, “IT TOOK.” I take this as the LOOK took – in other words, the “besotted” gaze of the divinities finds itself also in the ape, thru the act of locking eyes. Love takes up residence in the creature, not after abandoning but expanding from the eyes of its creators – the way that one flame ignites another.

True Love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
Love is like understanding, that grows bright,
Gazing on many truths; ’tis like thy light,
Imagination!

That’s from Shelley’s Epipsychidion (note in its midst the root word psyche). In his essay on this poem in The Visionary Company, Harold Bloom writes: “The title probably means ‘a work about the soul out of my soul’, the epipsyche, or emanation, as Blake calls it. Dante’s Beatrice is Shelley’s probable model…” This makes me smile, because I planned to cite Dante’s New Life at the end. But back to Merrill’s Psyche, speaking from the spirit board:

THE APE AMUSED US . . . GOD & I EXCHANGED A LOOK
& THEN BESOTTEDLY TURNED OUR EYES INTO THE DEPTHS OF HIS.   IT TOOK.

Now I’ll jump right to the excerpts, because I spoke my piece above. Here is a passage from the Gospel According to Philip [38; Bentley Layton’s translation]:

People cannot see anything in the real realm unless they become it. In the realm of truth, it is not as human beings in the world, who see the sun without being the sun, and see the sky and the earth and so forth without being them. Rather, if you have seen any things there, you have become those things: if you have seen the spirit, you have become the spirit; if you have seen the anointed (Christ), you have become the anointed (Christ); if you have seen the [father, you] will become the father. Thus [here] (in the world), you see everything and do not [see] your own self. But there, you see yourself; for you shall [become] what you see.

Finally, in light of all the above, consider these words from Dante’s Alighieri’s Vita Nuova (sec. XIV; Ralph Waldo Emerson’s version):

Then were my spirits destroyed through the force with which Love took me, seeing himself in such nearness to the most gentle lady [Beatrice], that there did not remain in life any but the spirits of sight, & even these remained outside of their organs, because Love wished to stand in their most noble place to see the wonder of this lady. And as soon as I was other than at first, I was much grieved for these little spirits (spiritelli) who lamented aloud, & said, If this one had not dazzled us out of our places, we could have remained to see the marvel of this dame . . .  Therefore the friend of good faith took me by the hand & asked me what ailed me? Then I answered somewhat, & rallied my dead-like spirits, & these fugitives being returned to their seats, I said to my friend these words,—“I have had my feet in that part of the life beyond, from which there is no more power in the understanding to return.”

P.S.

Only because it serves as a prototypical illustration of bathos do I allow myself now to share another faux-gangster rap demo. This is the third of ten; I’m uploading the whole album here online, one track at a time. As I keep explaining (see my last two blog entries), each of the album’s songs ends with a guitar performance by my biological brother Paul; and I didn’t let him rehearse or do more than one take: I just forced him to play cold during his first time hearing each beat. More info here.

https://bryanray444.tumblr.com/post/167342405156/an-uninspired-pseudo-gangster-demo-track-from-the