The Wit of the Staircase

The View From The Staircase

"Go live, win and lose, smash your hands against hysterical constellations, your head against phases of the moon, and your heart against another heart. Find the leisure to contemplate the results. You will discover the human condition. Foolish people who say that they seek reality don’t know what they are saying. For them, the worldly, when they approach it, they tremble and feel weak, distressed, fearful, terrified and repelled. They reject the truth and turn somewhere else for it, an easier, a softer, lifeless one. Little do they realize that they have been through the door itself, and in error, stupefying ignorance, in that immensity, said nothing is here, and stepped back to dullness. They may be less eloquent and merely realize the words it is painful. I must stop it, and step back."

--John Brzostoski

Link: whiskey river.

Schopenhauer Vs. Parties

"A man asked his wise old uncle - 'Could it not be simply that we are alone and aimless, doomed to wander in an indifferent universe, with no hope of salvation, nor any prospect except misery, death and the empty reality of eternal nothing?'

The uncle replies - 'And you wonder why you're not invited to more parties'."

--Woody Allen, Getting Even

Wit On Schopenhauer Vs. Parties: The Wit of the Staircase: Sticky Fingers.

Quote Via: whiskey river.

A Red Queen, Playing With Heads

"When Mr. Lévi-Strauss wrote about this dwindling tribe in Tristes Tropiques, his fascinating 1955 memoir, he compared these 'knightly Indians' with their 'aristocratic arrogance' to a deck of European playing cards; they even looked the parts of jacks, kings and queens, he wrote, with their cloaks and tunics decorated in red and black with recurrent motifs resembling hearts, diamonds, spades and clubs. The tribal queens, Mr. Lévi-Strauss noted, even seemed to trump Lewis Carroll’s imagined Queen of Hearts with their taste for playing with severed heads brought back by warriors."

Link: Richard Rorty - Philosophy - Postmodernism - New York Times.

Dessert Topping On The Apocalypse Or Paradise Now? Wit Talks Art, War and Religion With Activist Father Frank Morales

Frank Morales is an Episcopal priest and activist in New York City.

Morales was born in 1949 and grew up in the Jacob Riis Houses on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His father was Puerto Rican and his mother Peruvian.

He first became involved in politics after the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King as a member of the Assassination Information Committee.

Morales became an assistant pastor in 1978. In the Bronx he worked with squatters. In one interview he recalled, "I used to walk out of services with a crowbar and we’d open up abandoned buildings...." He now works at St Mark's Church in-the-Bowery.

Wit and her partner, the artist Jeremy Blake, are currently residing in the church’s historic Ernest Flagg Rectory, where this interview took place.

Wit: So we of Wit want to hear about your years of research into a few of these covert Pentagon programs that have and are being instituted against civilian populations in places like good ol' New York and Los Angeles, particularly against these cities’ expressive and creative communities, their artists and filmmakers…

Father Frank Morales: Yes, well there's Operation Garden Plot, which is the U.S. Department of Defense code name for "U.S. Department of Defense Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2." But it's Garden Plot for short in most of the documents I've seen.

Wit: But some people say Operation Garden Plot is a myth, a paranoid invention…

FF: It's secret, but there's a paper trail, a legal trail. The legal eagles of the military, they're called Judge Advocate Generals, or JAGs. They're the legal sophists who rationalize the death machine. They've published a bunch of papers on assassination, on various things that are very interesting reading, and one of them is on the subject of domestic military operations, against civilian populations, and this is Operation Garden Plot.

Wit: So these Pentagon Programs against domestic dissent were ramped up after the popular movements of the sixties, correct? They didn't want young people rising up and ending any more of their wars.

FF: Yeah. The historical roots of Operation Garden Plot, namely the Pentagon civil disturbance plan, emerged from the Kerner Commission. This was a federal commission that was appointed in 1967 according to a President Johnson Executive Order, to examine the roots of the riots that took place. There were 109 urban uprisings that took place in 1967, and they're looking at particularly Detroit and Newark, Watts. This report mentions ways in which to prevent riots in the future, and it’s also the first document to outline how Operation Garden Plot is a preemptive concept in this regard.

Wit: So like Cointelpro, it was designed to identify people and groups before they came to be influential and sway their peers or, in the case of someone like John Lennon, their popular audiences?

FF: Yes, it's suppression of dissent, and you can find many other documents online, for those who care to, at The Center for Law and Military Operations, or CLAMO. On their publications page there's a long list of legal dossiers, legal opinions, on this and other subjects.

Wit: And these are Pentagon documents?

FF: Well, it's been a work in progress since the popular uprisings against the Vietnam War and other popular uprising in the sixties. The military guys are always tweaking it, working it and so on. Over the decades, there's been administrative shifts in terms of who's the executive agent in charge of these things. It used to be the Army; now it's Northcom, which Dick Cheney heads.

Wit: And you said since the sixties the Pentagon devotes more and more money and manpower to something called Operations Other Than War.

FF: Yes, there's an increasing focus on turning the psychological operations might, the money, the suppression of dissent toward civilian populations. You can read about Operations Other Than War in these military magazines--Parameters Magazine, Military Review, The Army War College. It’s OOTW for short--Operations Other than War.

Wit: So what sorts of measures do they suggest taking against dissenters, protestors, or just people who have unpopular opinions?

FF: The primary law of counterinsurgency is preemption, and Operation Garden Plot is the main preemptive counterinsurgency strategy. In other words, you need to move before the opposition has a chance to gather any strength whatsoever. So, what Garden Plot represents from a macro point of view is a counterinsurgency apparatus directed at the American people to preempt and prevent the rise of resistance.

Wit: And what's Operation Chaos then?

FF: Operation Chaos is an intelligence gathering apparatus that was compiling lists of people who were involved in dissent. You know, various forms of rebellion against the, quote, unquote, authority of the U.S. government. So, they kept files on people. A lot of this was exposed in the mid-70s during the Church Committee hearings. But the Pentagon's machinations in the suppression of dissent have to this day remained fairly submerged. Operation Garden Plot has not been the subject of an article in The Nation or any other liberal journals in any extensive way--and forget any kind of mainstream stuff....

An Empire Won

Acting in the Way of Nature
often means not acting -
Not doing anything.
Indeed an empire can often be won
By doing nothing at the right time.
Indeed a life can often be lost
By trying to do too much.

--Lao Tzu

Link: whiskey river.

More Interesting, More Hopeful

"Check Heidegger. I would agree with him that we do a lot better treating anxiety (some forms, at least) as a kind of beckoning of the self to a self rather than as a symptom of illness. This is why in writing novels I often find that it works to turn things upside-down and to set forth a character‹say, a woman with severe free-floating anxiety‹as more interesting, more hopeful, possessing greater possibilities than, say, another perfectly adjusted symptom-free woman. To say this is to say a good deal more than that illness is more interesting than health."

-Interview - Walker Percy

Via: ::: wood s lot ::: "the fitful tracing of a portal".

Fetishist Disavowal, Post 9/11 Reality

"In one of the Marx brothers' films, Groucho, when caught in a lie, answers angrily: 'Who are you going to believe, your eyes, or my words?' This apparently absurd logic renders perfectly the functioning of the symbolic order in which the social mask matters more than the direct reality of the individual who wears it. This function involves the structure of what Freud called 'fetishist disavowal': 'I know very well that things are the way I see them, that the person in front of me is a corrupted weakling, but I nonetheless treat him respectfully, since he wears the insignia of a judge....' So in a way, I do believe his words, not my eyes."

--Slavoj Zizek

Link: YouTube - 911 Mysteries.

Information Sickness And Time Fever: The Missing Real, Part 2

"Beset with information sickness and time fever, our challenge is to explode the continuum of history, as Benjamin realized in his final and best thinking.

Empty, homogenous, uniform time must give way to the singularity of the non-exchangeable present. Historical progress is made of time, which has steadily become a monstrous materiality, ruling and measuring life. The 'time' of non-domestication, of non-time, will allow each moment to be full of awareness, feeling, wisdom, and re-enchantment. The true duration of things can be restored when time and the other mediations of the symbolic are put to flight.

Derrida, sworn enemy of such a possibility, grounds his refusal of a rupture on the nature and allegedly eternal existence of symbolic culture: history cannot end, because the constant play of symbolic movement cannot end. This auto-da-fé is a pledge against presence, authenticity, and all that is direct, embodied, particular, unique, and free. To be trapped in the symbolic is only our current condition, not an eternal sentence...."

Link: Insurgent Desire - The Modern Anti-World .

Via: ::: wood s lot ::: "the fitful tracing of a portal".

Image, Ed Ruscha.

The Ape And The Angel: The Aphorisms Of Lichtenburg

"Books are like a mirror--if an ape looks in, you shouldn't expect an angel to look out."

--Georg Christoph Lichtenburg

Link: Lichtenberg.

Freud, Flowers, And Fantasy

"This paper traces the influence of Freud's adolescent language of flowers, a symbolic, metaphoric language of love, lust, and longing, from his youthful letters to Eduard Silberstein to later conceptualizations of his theory of sexuality, especially his 1905 theory of the transformations of puberty. In addition, information discovered by Boelich, editor of the Silberstein letters, sheds new light on the impetus for Freud's vigorous suppression of his adolescent poetic imagination and his adolescent crush on Gisela Fluss.

The paper demonstrates that Freud's adolescent poetic imagination was transformed into a scientific imagination; the imagery and metaphors derived from the language of flowers were incorporated into his theory of masculinity, equated with aggressive sexuality, differentiated from femininity, characterized by submission and masochistic fantasies. By presenting details of Freud's experience from his autobiographic writings, the paper demonstrates his use of his personal struggle with adolescent fantasies in drawing generalizations about the role of fantasy in mental life."

Link: Entrez PubMed