Comparing "heroes"

Two recent heroes of mechanical life surfaced in Januaries. There is the "Sully" who crash landed his plane and all aboard lived. His expertise in handling a plane when birds took out both engines, his modesty in dealing with the media, and his calm awareness of the role luck played, all have combined to give this guy deserved media coverage. But I cannot help but compare Sully, and Wesley Autrey. Autrey threw himself in front of a subway car to save a sick man who fell on the tracks and by covering the one man between the tracks, the train rolled over both of them safely. Wesley's expertise was action to save another at a level of physical awareness that you don't predict or expect. Wesley's heroism, though he saved one life, and not one hundred and fifty-five, was a bolt out of life, society, education, and all ordinary expectations. Whether he knows it or not, he has no idea what deciding factors determined his actions. Of course neither does Sully really know, but Sully assumes his actions could have been predicted, since he trained for decades as a pilot, and adviser on crisis situations. I guess the glimpse I felt was lurking here, and there may be more, is this: Autrey had no time to decide what to do, no training for heroics, no sense that he was expected to DO anything, and though it seems Sully did have the latter two elements in his favor, what people cannot understand, and I can only point to, is that both these heroes of the mechanical, acted in blindness with energies most people are totally unaware of. And they won---and most will never understand the odds, or unlikeliness of their victories.

One interesting thought about the difference between Sully and Wesley is that Sully may have gotten more public recognition because the public understood HIS competence in a way that they could not the deeds of Autrey. It is like Autrey's heroic deed was so off the meter that people do not really want to contemplate his heroism.


Becoming aware of such nameless energies and pointing others towards the existence of such energies is part of the work of Jan Cox. I say these figures acted mechanically and that is not entirely the case, but they were certainly unaware intellectually of what they were doing.

Rock Art and Hard Heads

We have all I think, glanced twice at an article on rock art. There is a part of the population that believes in extra terrestrials and finds confirmation of their visiting our planet in rock art, and ancient artistic depictions. I am putting this forward as common knowledge and as a basis for a question.  What is the appeal of  talk about extraterrestials?  It fills the airways sometimes, and yet is absurd. To support that position I merely ask: why don't spaceships land on the whitehouse lawn?  No, they appear to guys in pickups on lonely roads. There is no reliable evidence for UFO visits, and yet there is even among scientists discussion of the liklihood of extraterrestials existing. No evidence, and yet massive talk raises for me a question as to the appeal of such. 

On one level extraterrestials answer the question for many of where we came from.  This answer to the origins of life, of humanity, of civilization, is pretty low grade intellectually. To say human progress resulted from the visits of extraterrestials is to ignore the fact this theory merely pushes BACK the real question of origins.  To say extra terrestial visits explain life on this planet is to ignore the next question, how did life arise, progress take place, on the OTHER planet these extra terrestrials came from?? And so on, the infinite regress objection is easy, once it is pointed out, to grasp and I am relying on it.

One thing that occurred to me is that these so-called explanations avoid any theophantic mystery, any discussion of conscience in the terms of Georges Gurdjieff, or of essence in the (early) writing of Jan Cox. 

Perhaps it is precisely because these ideas about origin, come, so to speak, from intellectual vending machines, that their appeal is explained. The explanations of life on earth that invoke extraterrestrial visits is not intellectually challenging, to put it gently. Nothing is demanded from the believer except a certain credulity.  No effort is required intellectually, and this lack of effort is the gulf separating Gurdjieff and Jan Cox from most of twentieth century attempts at explaining ANYthing.  Say man, has a need to understand, regardless of his situation, and this urge is rarely totally eradicated (I think.)  Answering these questions in a non intellectually challenging way may just be comforting to some types. And in this and the last century, explanations addressing ultimate questions must have some scientific shreds attached. So nowadays people see not apparitions of women in blue, but they see spaceships. The more things change, the more things fall into the same rut. Just some thoughts.

Viewscasters

It is not just newscasters who have a tiny, invisible, microphone, in their, and somebody telling them what to say. Every adult on the planet (okay--most) has such a device.  The inhabitants of the planet though, do not recognize the microphone for what it is. They call it their "I."

We are all casting forth, someone else's "news."  If Life, that is, can be called a "someone."

A difference between newscasters and the ordinary verbiage is that newscasters know someone else is feeding them their lines.

The content of the news we are casting forth with each word, actually is significant not for its denotative value.  The news we are casting forth is like the songs of the birds: come here, go away, this is my space, I am here.

 

Pictures at an internal exhibition

Water routes have for most of man's history, been the main way he got around.  Canoes, for instance, require a binary motion to move through the water-one side, the other side, paddle paddle.  In my story, this is man's ordinary mentation. Then there is horseback. Faster, and mainly, you can go directly towards your goal, regardless (mostly) of the terrain.  Maybe in this story, horseback is having a teacher. So, we will mention that, and skip on. Because the thing I want to point at, is walking, maybe you could call it portage, combining water travel and carrying everything over the areas the river can't carry you.  The thing to notice here is that if you are walking, you have got to travel light if you are going anywhere of significance.  Carrying that canoe will slow you down, big time. But, though you may not ever (or so Jan Cox told us) completely eliminate the chatter, oops, 'canoe', of the journey, you can diminish, the weight, of what you carry on this trip.

January 20, 2009

Today we heard so often, "I never thought I would live to see this
day," and I thought again, the election of a black man to the
presidency is miraculous. It is impossible and yet it happened. These
words are a good way to point to the impossibility of history, to the
unavoidable and unrecognised ignorance which informs historical
generalizations. To call something miraculous is a certain way of
noticing ignorance. The sense that many feel regarding current events,
of the freshness, of the impossibilty, of the miraculous, is already
fading and will soon will be completely 'explained." And lost.

Yet the unknown interpenetrates what we think we know, like water in a
swamp. And by being unaware of the ignorance, we can not be confident,
cannot speak truly, of what we say we 'know.'

For the events leading to the inauguration were miraculous. Only in
hindsight can we explain them. And already we are forgetting that
sense of amazingness. That we forget the miraculous, does not make it
less so. Forgetting the miraculous just makes us--not the events,
mechanical. Just as it should be. But not "true."
Perhaps there is a miraculous edge to every mechanical thought, event.
What is not impossible is that through a certain perseverance this
edge can be kept intact by an individual, not by a group. Yet who is
interested in remembering what we don't know. In remembering how we
didn't know something.

Not What, but How: A Poem

"Epistemology"

Hmm hm

With the increased availability of data in these cyberdays (for
example google books),
education should focus more on what to do with the data, facts. fata,
how data is determined, facts dated, slant sliced.

It will do no good of course. Mystics are the philosophers who did not
fall by the way, since the way philosophers avert their daze is the
point.

Only for the mystics the joy of empirical epistemology.

Rip and Ruminate

The brain is the last to know. That is the way Jan Cox once expressed a physiological reality the implications of which are not grasped by the modern ordinary consciousness..  The literal truth of this gap (the gap between getting scratched and noticing the wound in  words, is the gap I am pointing to)  can be seen at various levels of human reality.

I am not now pointing to the most useful aspect of this gap--remembering it and the implications of the gap for knowing the present. The idea in this essay is looking at this gap in the macro world of human culture.

History reflects this gap--prior to the 19th century there was a certain accepted brutality at all social levels. I refer to bear baiitng, and public executions , for instance.  Yet a certain coarseness in sentiment was receding.  One way we know this is that this brutality began to be 'talked about.'   When a certain kind of brutality was ended, it could become the subject of discussions.  One place to see this verbalizing was the work the Grimm Brothers. In the fairy tales they collected, the brutality is  described.  The brutality in the fairytales (a woman dances to death in flaming shoes, for instance), reflects the real brutality which however, was already in the process of ending, or it  could not be talked about.

A  more recent example are the reparations paid to World War II victims. Why wait til the nineties to make these payments?  A case could be made that the payments were delayed because the war was not over til the nineties.--not over where it counts, in the bodies of men.

And today's paper has a lovely example.  There is a report that Wesley Autrey and Mr. Hollopeter had dinner together on Dec. 23.  This the paper says is the first time they met since the day Autrey jumped onto the subway track in front of an oncoming train to save the life of a stranger, Mr. Hollopeter.  The physical event was so dramatic that it took two years to really be over, and now the participants can 'discuss it.'

And again--this gap has a powerful use for those trying to remember themselves, to use the terminology of Gurjieff and Jan Cox.