Statu Nascenti

                                                              – 1 –

Creative writers assemble worlds. In their own minds they are god-like, absorbers who transform life.


I came of age in a Western world that worshipped the creative writer. My own path led me to criminals, disaffected intellectuals and poets both forlorn and courageous. People who lived the experienced life on its many levels were my friends and teachers.


My father was a middleman in the Jersey mob. A crooner, a charmer, he enjoyed punching out black men who wandered into his all-white bar. Siring me became one of the worst days of his life for I was born an egalitarian, a believer in the world of free souls. I went my own way as did millions of my generation. We worshiped the courage and beauty of a people who had broken out of slavery and had transformed themselves into a power in the land of the free. Such expressions being of the highest order I came to love the freedom to grow, to sing the most meaningful songs, to read the most powerful books and to laugh at adversity. Unfortunately, the levers that controlled my society’s direction were clogged with patronage and a condescending hatred for the aesthetic intellect. To paraphrase a line in Purcell’s opera, Dido and Aeneas, “Those who seek great power against themselves conspire and shun the cure they most desire.” 

– 2 –

The Ideal is the enemy of the Real. Since 1700 B.C. or so people began traveling in a realm called the Ideal. It is manifested in the oneness, the singularity, platonic philosophy, Indian nations of withdrawing into the ONE (the divine), and the desire to mold the other in one’s own image. Each discipline sifts through the debris – seeking that unimaginable hope in which man resides.


I find this kind of thinking to be props for the expansion of the God of Self-Interest and the prevailing need to heap the ideal on the other. We are the victims of this befuddled and muddled policy. The staggering intellectual creations of men like Rousseau and Hegel (two polar opposites) amount to fictions no different but certainly less elegant than Prof. Dodgson or Jonathan Swift, but Rousseau and Hegel do not possess the beauty of Reality. They are in fact looking for it – the essence, the eye without boundary, a gorgeous bauble which others admire. Watch hamster, meditate upon the dream. All the slicing and dicing about the sad state of affairs the Enlightenment followers have brought us is based on loss – must missed it, as if the great books of the Western world ever did anything but grow individual egos, the impenetrable egos, which freed them to continue the slicing and dicing while maintaining the scaffolding of Empire.


In the end all analysis is entertainment until the work results in the discovery of a new world (Pasteur, Einstein, Jonathan Swift, Matilda Gage). For all the talk about the current lack of political leadership or any semblance of a long term economic policy the brute fact about the West is to quote Allan Bloom, “The crisis of the West is a crisis of belief – in the justice of our principles.”


During the 1991 Gulf War a Moroccan female scholar is reputed to have said: “The enemy is no longer just on earth; he occupies the heavens and the stars and rules over time. He seduces one’s wife, veiled or not, entering through the skylight of television. Bombs are only an incidental accessory for the new masters. Cruise missiles are for greater occasions and the inevitable sacrifices. In normal times they nourish us with software, advertising messages, teenage songs, everyday tech info, courses for earning diplomas, languages and codes to master. Our servitude is fluid, our humiliation anesthetizing.”