Fall 2012

I wanted you. And I was looking for you. But I couldn't find you. I wanted you. And I was looking for you all day. But I couldn't find you. I couldn't find you. You're walking. And you don't always realize it, but you're always falling. With each step you fall forward slightly. And then catch yourself from falling. Over and over, you're falling. And then catching yourself from falling. And this is how you can be walking and falling at the same time.

Traveling without moving

Again, we may find a violence in some of the traditional imagery which tends to obscure the changelessness of God, the peace, which nearly all who approach Him have reported—the ‘still, small voice’. And it is here, I think, that the pre-Christian imagery is least suggestive. Yet even here, there is a danger lest the half conscious picture of some huge thing at rest—a clear, still ocean, a dome of ‘white radiance’—should smuggle in ideas of inertia or vacuity. The stillness in which the mystics approach Him is intent and alert—at the opposite pole from sleep or reverie. They are becoming like Him. Silences in the physical world occur in empty places: but the ultimate Peace is silent through very density of life. Saying is swallowed up in being. There is no movement because His action (which is Himself) is timeless. You might, if you wished, call it movement at an infinite speed, which is the same thing as rest, but reached by a different—perhaps a less misleading—way of approach.

Lewis, C. S.. Miracles (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewi) (pp. 148-149). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Hope Prayer

I hope that I will always be for each man what he needs me to be.

I hope that each man's death will always diminish me, but that fear of my own will never diminish my joy of life.

I hope that my love for those whom I like will never lessen my love for those whom I do not.

I hope that another man's love for me never be measure of my love for him.

I hope that every man will accept me as I am, but that I never will.

I hope that I will always ask for forgiveness from others, but will never need be asked for my own.

I hope that I will find a woman to love, but that I will never seek one.

I hope that I will always recognize my limitations, but that I will construct none.

I hope that loving will always be my goal, but that love will never be my idol.

I hope that every man will always have hope.

--Henri Nouwen, "Intimacy"

PS: Propaganda by Edward L. Bernays

This book is more a general survey of the use of propaganda in public relations and marketing in the US in the early twentieth century. It has value in observing the extent of the use of propaganda in various spheres of society up to 1928AD. Eighty-four years later here in the early twenty-first century we can contrast our current situation of consolidated control of media outlets, spin-doctoring, and general over-saturation of marketing to the point where we all must endure this time of universal deceit. Not using propaganda and simply speaking the truth is now a revolutionary act (to paraphrase Orwell), but I diagress...I was disappointed with this small book (now in PDF), because I was looking for a more practical exposition of the various elements of propaganda and how to best effectively use them to achieve the desired results. I shall have to look elsewhere for my on-going research. The book does have value for historical perspective and to give some general ideas on the more benign aspects of propaganda as used in public relations and marketing. Another valuable aspect of this book is the window into the elitest/oligarchic view of the masses as objects for manipulation that the professional propagandist holds; here illustrated by the following quote:

"No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders."

The book also brought to mind Asimov's idea of the psycho-historian in his Foundation Trilogy. On balance, the book is worth reading.

View all my reviews

Personal Update

I give thanks and praise to God for the small measure of peace He has given me recently. I am back to reading again and shall soon take up my keyboard and write again. I started to attend a writers group led by an excellent about-to-be published historical fiction writer. After taking to heart the constructive criticism of my writing, I realized that I needed to go back to the fundamentals of good prose. I am going all the way back to work on sentence structure, paragraph structure, and style/texture. Once I have improved beyond embarrassing myself, I hope to go back to the group.

Most of my past writing has been non-fiction essays or papers for school, and in recent times this blog. Now I am trying my hand at fiction writing--a completely different way of expression. When I was writing creatively in high school, I concentrated on poetry, and at the time I concurred with writers from olden times who believed that poetry was the highest form of literature. But we must fast-forward several hundred years later to the present day where the novel, graphic novel, and screenplay are the most popular media for telling stories. Writing fiction is more difficult than it first appears, and I must go through much failure before anyone will like my stories. I hope my Lord Jesus Christ will help me to persevere so that I can tell the many stories locked up inside my head; if the Lord allows, I hope to give greater glory to Him, by blessing readers with good reads. It is a tall order, and I still feel too much, but by His grace.....

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Personal Update

The personal problems that I am currently facing have brought to my notice an ongoing problem in the way my synaptic pathways are wired in my brain. My reading and writing abilities are directly linked to my emotional state and this causes difficulties when bad things happen or I find myself depressed. I haven't been able to do much writing and my reading has fallen way off (strange for me since I love reading), in the last six months. I think the solution would be for me to find a way to separate my emotions and moods from the reading & writing process. This will be difficult for me and I am praying that God will help me to overcome this problem. I have never been interested in studying psychology, but I may have to do some research to see if I can make some mental changes.

While I am trying to make these changes, I am going into a dietary change and a bit of fasting from various luxuries. I may get very grouchy in the coming months; I'm praying that God will provide enough grace to me that I can cope.

After Sam (my son) went through his mental difficulties in January (the $6,000 psychiatry bill for which is now coming due), I dropped everything in my intellectual life to try to maintain communications with him. Sam is doing better now and has moved out to room with someone for whom he is providing care-giving services. The move was sudden, and Sam has broken off communications with us, so all my concern didn't matter. The people he is staying with are Christians, so I am grateful for their influence, but I am thinking that the only way for me to cope with the rejection is to give him over to God's hands, pray for everything to turn out right, and just get on with my life as if my son were dead. I suppose until he is ready to take another look at the fifth commandment, I should just operate as if he was dead and be grateful for what we had in the past.

If anyone has stumbled across this entry and actually gotten this far into the entry, and if you are a Christian, pray that God will help me to remove the emotional entanglement in my mind with my ability to write. I feel too much.

***

Social Philosophy: Autonomen

In the article in wikipedia, while going on about all the aspects of this particular political flavor, we find the following sentence (this may be of interest to my friend, Bobtalk):::

"Pirate radio stations also were a factor in spreading autonomist ideas. Bologna's Radio Alice was an example of such a station."

Background trivia for current story.

The high porosity of the interior of Phobos (based on the density of 1.88 g/cm³, voids are estimated to comprise 25 to 35 percent of Phobos' volume) is inconsistent with an asteroidal origin.

In 2095AD, Space Exploration Arm Mission, "Falcon's Perch" successfully discovers that Phobos has been systematically mined by another space-faring civilization. Ship archeologists and planetologists conclude in several lengthy reports to the International Space Agency that some bioforms were discovered... The survivors of the mission are ordered to Mars' Alpha-One headquarters.

Dateline 2096AD: The Republic of Mars loses contact with a surface garrison base on Phobos. Grand Marshall Marquis Hector de la Vasquez offers a reward of ten million Imperial Credits (9.8Billion USD c.2012)to any private mercenary group or traveller capable of penetrating the base on Phobos and reporting upon the status of the missing troops...

Personal Update

This entry serves as a personal time-stamp to document current difficulties*, and hopefully it will provide me with a possibility of facing my problems in a constructive way (perhaps another vain hope).

Psalm 128
1) Blessed is everyone who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways!
2) You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands; you shall be blessed, and it shall be well with you.
3) Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children will be like olive shoots around your table.
4) Behold, thus shall the man be blessed who fears the Lord.
5) The Lord bless you from Zion! May you see the prosperity of Jerusalem all the days of your life!
6) May you see your children’s children! Peace be upon Israel!

I was reading from psalm 128 quoted above. It talks about fearing the Lord and the conditional promise (vs 4) of the results of fearing Him. And, especially since I have been thinking about the Covenant Theology aspect of Christian Theology, I really believed this promise. I thought fearing the Lord meant belief and faith in God and His promises and attempting to obey the commandments out of gratitude for the salvation and other good gifts He gives. I actually got excited about serving the Kingdom by establishing institutions and raising believing offspring, but reality has demonstrated to me the vanity of such false hopes of improvement. When it turns out that you are a lousy parent and your child goes down the path of failure and wrongness, it requires some justification or explanation. The only thing that makes sense is that by definition I have not properly “feared the Lord”. Nowhere in the quoted passage does it mention the consequences of sin and how those consequences can snuff out the promise. I still believe in God and respect Him, but for me, those promises in the Bible are getting harder to believe since they don’t seem to be happening in my life. I got lucky these past few years and got a good job in this horrid economy, so I was able to rise above mere survival; I am grateful for this blessing. Now I have some stability in my social status (upper working class), but my family is falling apart. This is all probably my fault on every level, but I knew I couldn’t live a true, honest, and Christian life without spiritual help from God. I have needed help all along, but I just didn’t know how to access the help I needed. It breaks my heart to actually see from scripture what should have been my life and compare it to how my life actually turned out.

Now the standard Evangelical way of explaining away promises like the one in the Psalm above is to point out that since the advent of Christ, everything is to be spiritualized and that to believe in an actual physical promise is wrong. I don’t buy it, but when everything falls down such views take on a more “truthiness” type of flavor.

It is a terrible and awful (in the original sense of these words) thing to realize that you are cut off from the future (as far as your own lineage goes) and that judgment day cometh and you have failed.

There were two ways I could have ended the curse of sin in my dysfunctional family. One is to not have children at all and end the genetic mistakes (the easier way and preferred by planned parenthood), the other is to try to raise them in the faith and make every sacrifice for their betterment with (hopefully) the help of God. The second option is the harder and more noble of the two, and with enough hope, it even seems possible (after all haven’t many other families in the church accomplished this?). This second option is also dangerous, because if you fail, you have made things worse and the curse continues and now the dysfunction continues. I should not have hoped. I should have taken the easier first option. May God have mercy on my soul.


*Several days ago, my son, Samuel, was hospitalized for attempted suicide.