Saturday, December 1, 2012

If I had thoughts to think at this moment now, where we are here in the US of A, I would think about
"the least of these."

Good job, PBS, tonight.  Frontline's piece on Poor Kids.  Followed by a documentary, Park Avenue, about the addresses of billionaires and Koch brothers, some pretty big and selfish Egos, adept at mistruths, taken on up the street into the poorest congressional district in the US, where people aren't so well off.

So...

When we love, we put ourselves humble, we put ourselves low, we become the least.  In doing so, we come into focus, some might say; a mode, we enter into.  And this would be confusing to anyone involved with mass culture, the great show, aggressive, conspicuous, powerful, desired wealth, as it runs largely contrary to it.  Our culture trains to show, greatly, make a big show of love.  Beyond the show of plumage and competence, a show of material comfort and enticements (and shopping abilities) perhaps?  It sounds silly to mention.  To be quiet about it, to be reserved, that would seem to us almost as creepy or psychologically unhealthy.

An economy that works must allow a place for the humble worker bee, who goes to work with sentiment based on love.  The fault of society lies in not creating a culture where meekness and humility   are celebrated (rather than taken as a sign of personal weakness.)

Then there are the Ayn Rand Libertarians...  In contrast to an FDR, who saw the great moral waste of people out of work, the moral value of people having work.  Simple works the WPA initiated, like making hiking trails still in happy use today.

Good simple work that everyone can do, and also make an attempt of a living from--that might well be what we could use.  Not the complex stuff that was wrought upon us by investors, investors pushing high tech stuff so that they could make money in speculation, the same folks who tanked our economy through speculations upon speculations.

One of the many reasons PBS deserves its place, and even a better one.


I suppose my own work, behind a bar, or more nebulously in a notebook, is of the same lines as that good ole WPA make-work, nothing remarkable, just using a resource that would otherwise go to waste.    Not stuff of the big CEO Ego with big earnings and big lifestyle and conspicuous 'hard work.'  Indeed, far more toward the employ an unemployable bum side of things.  Becoming a school teacher got too complicated for him, and that system seems largely broken to him anyway as far as the temperament of his offerings.

But the artist's workshop, his atelier, the humble discoveries of things that might be sung about in sonnets, like the great humility of love, the rare sense of being unworthy but lifted up anyway, maybe these are practical discoveries in that they might speak to the human condition or to the meaning of life or to the meaning of reality.

What else can an artist do, but sing of happy but very impractical things that have little bearing on the workings of the world.  Doesn't the History Channel's 'Mankind, the Story of All of Us' show us that history is decided by battles, iron, military might, so that the main comment material was provided by celebrity warriors you wouldn't want to mess with?  (Give them credit for touching upon Jesus--they bloodied him up pretty good, of course--and for mentioning the world's major religions, though beyond the history of the Roman Empire there was little of it.)

Thankfully there are small discoveries that artist can make, observations on what we might call the soul.  What is the soul of love when we love?  Not being churchmen, artists and writers have come up with interesting and often dark versions of love, as if it were their primary business, failed love, love gone bad, Romeo and Juliet, love of the thwarted beings populating Winesburg, Ohio, Hemingway's tragedies...  And it makes for good reading, good entertainment, I suppose.  However, we still have to get up the next day and go about our business, and so, without an adult view (like that of Chekhov) such dwellings upon can become adolescent, a song of Ego, therefore false, to be risen above in the spirit of normal human calm, to be ultimately ignored like the mature turning off the latest pop song with its heavy beat and incessant shrill 'me me me.'  (As 'me' is ultimately an illusion.)

The humility of love... well, what do we do with it?  Does that help us make better microchips?  Well, no, not at all, but maybe it does help explain another mystery, of how we manage to go off to work every day, not out of selfishness or careerist stuff, but more or less selflessly, being the spark plug of the great democratic economy.  Even without promise of retirement or security.

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