"I Mean to Have You, Even if it Must Be Burglary."
- Uncle Bertie
"...Loot! He Stole That!
...Mind You..."
"Burglar wants a good job, plenty of Excitement and reasonable Reward..."
The people before the Revolution of July, says Marmontel, “ were not sufficiently accustomed to crime, and in order to inure them to it they must be practised in it.”
The way Campbell explained it, Young Men need a Secondary Father to finish raising them.
Beyond their Biological Father, they need a surrogate, traditionally a minister or a coach or a military officer.
The floatsam and jetsam of a generation washed up on the beach of last resort.
That's why street gangs are so appealing.
They send you men out, like Knights on Quests to hone their skills and improve themselves.
And all the TRADITIONAL Mentors -- forget it.
Men are presumptive predators. They're leaving Teaching in droves.
Religious Leaders are pariahs.
Sports Coaches are stigmatized as odds-on pedophiles.
Even The Military is sketchy with sexual goings-on.
A Generation of Apprentices Without Masters.
Derek Vineyard
(note the surname)
is a Reverse-Noah.
" The Question is, what does it mean to see your father naked?
And especially in an inappropriate manner, like this.
It’s as if Ham…He does the same thing that happens in the Mesopotamian creation myth, when Tiamat and Apsu give rise to the first Gods, who are the father of the eventual deity of redemption: Marduk.
The first Gods are very careless and noisy, and they kill Apsu, their father, and attempt to inhabit his corpse.
That makes Tiamat enraged.
She bursts forth from The Darkness to do them in.
It’s like a precursor to the flood story, or an analog to the flood story. I see the same thing happening, here, with Ham.
He’s insufficiently respectful of his father.
The Question is, 'Exactly what does The Father represent?'
You could say, well, there’s The Father That You Have: A human being, a man among Men.
But then there’s The Father-as-such, and that’s The Spirit of The Father.
Insofar as you have a father, you have both at the same time: you have the personal father, a man among other Men—just like anyone other’s father— but insofar as that man is your father, that means that he’s something different than just another person.
What he is, is the incarnation of The Spirit of The Father. To disrespect that carelessly…
And Noah makes a mistake, right?
He produces wine and gets himself drunk.
You might say, well, if he’s sprawled out there for everyone to see, it’s hardly Ham’s fault, if he stumbles across him. But the book is laying out a danger.
The danger is that, well, maybe you catch your father at his most vulnerable moment, and if you’re disrespectful, then you transgress against The Spirit of The Father.
And if you transgress against The Spirit of The Father and lose respect for The Spirit of The Father, then that is likely to transform you into a slave.
Bob Sweeney: There was a moment, when I used to blame everything and everyone for all the pain and suffering and vile things that happened to me, that I saw happen to my people.
Used to blame everybody.
Blamed White People, Blamed Society, Blamed God.
I didn't get no answers, 'cause I was asking the wrong questions.
You have to ask the right questions.
Derek Vinyard: Like what?
Bob Sweeney: Has anything you've done made your life better?
" That’s a very interesting idea.
I think it’s particularly germane to our current cultural situation.
I think that we’re constantly pushed to see the nakedness of our Father, so to speak, because of the intense criticism that’s directed towards our culture—the patriarchal culture.
We’re constantly exposing its weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and, let’s say, its nakedness.
There’s nothing wrong with criticism, but the purpose of criticism is to separate the wheat from the chaff:
It’s not to burn everything to the ground.
It’s to say, well, we’re going to carefully look at this; we’re going to carefully differentiate; we’re going to keep what’s good, and we’re going to move away from what’s bad. The criticism isn’t to identify everything that’s bad: it’s to separate what’s good from what’s bad, so that you can retain what’s good and move towards it.
To be careless of that is deadly.
You’re inhabited by the spirit of the Father, right?
Insofar as you’re a cultural construction, which, of course, is something that the postmodern neo-Marxists are absolutely emphatic about: you’re a cultural construction.
Insofar as you’re a cultural construction, then you’re inhabited by the spirit of the Father.
To be disrespectful towards that means to undermine the very structure that makes up a good portion of what you are, insofar as you’re a socialized, cultural entity.
If you pull the foundation out from underneath that, what do you have left?
You can hardly manage on your own. It’s just not possible. You’re a cultural creation. Ham makes this desperate error, and is careless about exposing himself to the vulnerability of his father.
Something like that. He does it without sufficient respect.
The judgement is that, not only will he be a slave, but so will all of his descendants.
He’s contrasted with the other two sons, who, I suppose, are willing to give their father the benefit of the doubt.
When they see him in a compromising position, they handle it with respect, and don’t capitalize on it.
Maybe that makes them strong.
That’s what it seems like to me. I think that’s what that story means.
It has something to do with respect.
The funny thing about having respect for your culture—and I suppose that’s partly why I’m doing the Biblical stories: they’re part of my culture.
They’re part of our culture, perhaps.
But they are certainly part of my culture.
It seems to me that it’s worthwhile to treat that with respect, to see what you can glean from it, and not kick it when it’s down, let’s say.
Upon exiting the ark on the new land, a shameful Noah goes into isolation in a nearby cave, making wine in which to drown his sorrows.
Ham expresses disappointment for his father's current state of unseemly drunkenness and nakedness before leaving his kin to live alone.
Having reconciled at the behest of Ila, Noah blesses the family as the beginning of a new human race and all witness waves of immense celestial rainbows.
VITO CORLEONE
So -- Barzini will move against you first.
He'll set up a meeting with someone that you
absolutely trust -- guaranteeing your safety.
And at that meeting, you'll be assassinated.
(then, as the Don drinks from a glass of wine as Michael watches him)
I like to drink wine more than I used to -- anyway, I'm drinking more...
MICHAEL It's good for you, Pop. VITO CORLEONE
(after a long pause) I don't know -
- your wife and children -
- are you happy with them? MICHAEL Very happy...
VITO CORLEONE That's good. (then) I hope you don't mind the way I -- I keep going over this Barzini business...
MICHAEL No, not at all...
VITO CORLEONE It's an old habit.
I spent my life trying not to be careless -- women and children can be careless, but not Men. (then) How's your boy?
MICHAEL He's good -- VITO CORLEONE : You know he looks more like you every day. MICHAEL :
(smiling) He's smarter than I am.
Three years old, he can read the funny papers VITO CORLEONE :
(laughs) Read the funny papers -- (then) Oh -- well -- eh, I want you to arrange to have a telephone man check all the calls that go in and out of here -- because... MICHAEL I did it already, Pop.
VITO CORLEONE -- ya'know, cuz it could be anyone... MICHAEL Pop, I took care of that.
VITO CORLEONE Oh, that's right -- I forgot.
MICHAEL : (reaching over, touching his father) What's the matter?
What's bothering you? (then, after the Don doesn't answer) I'll handle it.
I told you I can handle it, I'll handle it. VITO CORLEONE : (as he stands) I knew that Santino was going to have to go through all this.
And Fredo -- well -- (then, after he sits besides Michael) Fredo was -- well -- But I never -- I never wanted this for you.
I worked my whole life, I don't apologize, to take care of my family. And I refused -- to be a fool -
Dancing on The String, held by all those -- bigshots.
I don't apologize -- that's my life -- But I thought that --
That when it was your time -- that --
That you would be the one to hold the strings. Senator - Corleone. Governor - Corleone, or something... MICHAEL : Another pezzonovante... VITO CORLEONE : Well -- it wasn't enough time, Michael.
Wasn't enough time...
MICHAEL We'll get there, Pop --
We'll get there...
VITO CORLEONE Uh...
(then, after kissing Michael on the cheek)
Now listen -- Whoever comes to you with this Barzini meeting --
He's The Traitor.
Don't forget that.
"And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan. These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread. And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard. And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.
"And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness. And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.
"And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servants. And Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years. And all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years: and he died. And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech."
I remember thinking about this story 30 years ago. I think the meaning of the story stood out for me. When you read complicated materials, sometimes, a piece of complicated material will stand out, for some reason. It’s like it glitters, I suppose. That might be one way of thinking about it. You’re in sync with it, and you can understand what it means. I really experienced that reading the Dao De Jing, which is this document that I would really like to do a lecture on, at some point. I don’t understand some of the verses, but others stand right out, and I can understand them.
I think I understood what this part of the story of Noah meant. We talked a little bit about what nakedness meant in the story of Adam and Eve. The idea, essentially, was that, to know yourself naked is to become aware of your vulnerability—your physical boundaries in time and space and your fundamental, physiological insufficiencies as they might be judged by others.
There’s biological insufficiency that’s built into you, because you’re a fragile, mortal, vulnerable, half insane creature, and that’s just an existential truth. And then, of course, merely as a human being—even with all those faults—there are faults that you have that are particular to you, that might be judged harshly by the group…Well, will definitely be judged harshly by the group. And so to become aware of your nakedness is to become self-conscious, to know your limits, and to know your vulnerability.
That’s what is revealed to Ham when he comes across his father naked.
The question is, what does it mean to see your father naked?
And especially in an inappropriate manner, like this. It’s as if Ham…
He does the same thing that happens in the Mesopotamian creation myth, when Tiamat and Apsu give rise to the first Gods, who are the father of the eventual deity of redemption: Marduk.
The first Gods are very careless and noisy, and they kill Apsu, their father, and attempt to inhabit his corpse.
That makes Tiamat enraged. She bursts forth from the darkness to do them in.
It’s like a precursor to the flood story, or an analog to the flood story.
I see the same thing happening, here, with Ham -
He’s insufficiently respectful of his father.
The question is, exactly what does the father represent?
You could say, well, there’s the father that you have: a human being, a man among men.
But then there’s the Father as such, and that’s the spirit of the Father.
Insofar as you have a father, you have both at the same time: you have the personal father, a man among other men—just like anyone other’s father—but insofar as that man is your father, that means that he’s something different than just another person.
What he is, is the incarnation of the spirit of The Father.
To disrespect that carelessly…
Noah makes a mistake, right?
He produces wine and gets himself drunk. You might say, well, if he’s sprawled out there for everyone to see, it’s hardly Ham’s fault, if he stumbles across him.
But the book is laying out a danger.
The danger is that, well, maybe you catch your father at his most vulnerable moment, and if you’re disrespectful -
Then you transgress against The Spirit of The Father.
And if you transgress against The Spirit of The Father and lose respect for The Spirit of The Father, then that is likely to transform you into a slave.
That’s a very interesting idea. I think it’s particularly germane to our current cultural situation. I think that we’re constantly pushed to see the nakedness of our Father, so to speak, because of the intense criticism that’s directed towards our culture—the patriarchal culture. We’re constantly exposing its weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and, let’s say, its nakedness. There’s nothing wrong with criticism, but the purpose of criticism is to separate the wheat from the chaff: it’s not to burn everything to the ground. It’s to say, well, we’re going to carefully look at this; we’re going to carefully differentiate; we’re going to keep what’s good, and we’re going to move away from what’s bad.
The criticism isn’t to identify everything that’s bad: it’s to separate what’s good from what’s bad, so that you can retain what’s good and move towards it. To be careless of that is deadly. You’re inhabited by the spirit of the Father, right? Insofar as you’re a cultural construction, which, of course, is something that the postmodern neo-Marxists are absolutely emphatic about: you’re a cultural construction. Insofar as you’re a cultural construction, then you’re inhabited by the spirit of the Father. To be disrespectful towards that means to undermine the very structure that makes up a good portion of what you are, insofar as you’re a socialized, cultural entity. If you pull the foundation out from underneath that, what do you have left? You can hardly manage on your own. It’s just not possible. You’re a cultural creation.
Ham makes this desperate error, and is careless about exposing himself to the vulnerability of his father. Something like that. He does it without sufficient respect. The judgement is that, not only will he be a slave, but so will all of his descendants. He’s contrasted with the other two sons, who, I suppose, are willing to give their father the benefit of the doubt. When they see him in a compromising position, they handle it with respect, and don’t capitalize on it. Maybe that makes them strong. That’s what it seems like to me. I think that’s what that story means. It has something to do with respect. The funny thing about having respect for your culture—and I suppose that’s partly why I’m doing the Biblical stories: they’re part of my culture. They’re part of our culture, perhaps. But they are certainly part of my culture. It seems to me that it’s worthwhile to treat that with respect, to see what you can glean from it, and not kick it when it’s down, let’s say.
And so that’s how the story of Noah ends. The thing, too, is that Noah is actually a pretty decent incarnation of the spirit of the Father, which, I suppose, is one of the things that makes Ham’s misstep more egregious. I mean, Noah just built an ark and got everybody through the flood, man. It’s not so bad, and so maybe the fact that he happened to drink too much wine one day wasn’t enough to justify humiliating him. I don’t think it’s pushing the limits of symbolic interpretation to note on a daily basis that we’re all contained in an ark. You could think about that as the ark that’s been bequeathed to us by our forefathers: that’s the tremendous infrastructure that we inhabit, that we take for granted because it works so well. It protects us from things that we cannot even imagine, and we don’t have to imagine them, because we’re so well protected.
One of the things that’s really struck me hard about the disintegration and corruption of the universities is the absolute ingratitude that goes along with that. Criticism, as I said, is a fine thing, if it’s done in a proper spirit, and that’s the spirit of separating the wheat from the chaff. But it needs to be accompanied by gratitude, and it does seem to me that anyone who lives in a Western culture at this time and place in history, and who isn’t simultaneously grateful for that, is half blind, at least.
It’s never been better than this, and it could be so much worse—and it’s highly likely that it will be so much worse, because, for most of human history, so much worse is the norm.
Yes, the Devil is in your hands, and I will suck it out.
Now, I will not cast this ghost out with a fever, for the new spirit inside me has shown me I have a new way to communicate. It is a gentle whisper.
Get out of here, ghost. Get out of here, ghost. Get out. Get out of here, ghost. Get out of here, ghost. Get out of here, ghost. Get out of here, and don't you dare turn around and come back, for if you do, all the armies of my boot will kick you in the teeth, and you will be cast up and thrown in the dirt and thrust back to Perdition!
And as long as I have teeth, I will bite you! And if I have no teeth, I will gum you! And as long as I have fists, I will bash you!
Now, get out of here ghost! Get out of here, ghost! Get out of here, ghost! Egh! YEOW! And it left!
" All
right, so here’s how the book opens: "In the beginning, God created the
heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and
darkness was over the face of the deep. And the spirit of God was
hovering over the face of the waters." This is a hard narrative section
to get a handle on because, in order to understand it properly, you have
to actually look behind it. There are a lot of pieces of old stories in
the Old Testament that flesh out the meaning of these lines. I can give
you a quick overview of it. One of the ideas that lurks underneath
these lines—although you can't tell, because it's in English. You have
to look at the original language, and, of course, I don't speak the
original language. I’ve had to use secondary sources, too bad for me.
But the "without form and void," and the deep idea—you see, that's
associated with this notion of endless, deep potential. For example,
words that are used to represent "without form and void" are something
like—I’m going to get this partly wrong—tohu wa-bohu. Another one is
tehom. It’s important to know this, because those words are associated
with an earlier Mesopotamian word, which is Tiamat. Tiamat
was a dragon-like creature who represented the salt water. Tiamat had a
husband named Apsu. Tiamat and Apsu were locked together in a kind of
sexual embrace. I would say that's potential and order, or chaos and
order. They were locked together, and it was that union of chaos and
order that gave rise in the old Mesopotamian myth, the Enuma Elis, to
being, to the old Gods first, and then, eventually, as creation
progressed, to human beings themselves. There's
this idea lurking underneath these initial lines that God is akin to
that which confronts the unknown, carves it into pieces, and makes the
world out of its pieces. The thing that it confronts is something like a
predatory reptile, a dragon, or a serpent. I think part of the reason
for that—and this is a very deep and ancient idea—is that…This is where
it gets so complicated to do the translation. It’s partly how human
beings created our world. We went out beyond the confines of our safe
spaces—let's say our safe spaces defined by the tree or the fire—and we
actively voyaged outward to the places that we were afraid of and didn't
understand. We conquered and encountered things out there: animals,
mammoths, snakes, and predators of all sorts. It was as a consequence of
that active, brave engagement with the terrifying domain of what we did
not understand that the world, in fact, was generated. That idea lurks
deeply inside the opening lines of Genesis. It’s
a profound idea, in my estimation. I think, also, that the way our
brains are structured—and this is something that I’m going to try to
develop more today—is the ancient circuits that our ancestors used to
deal with the space beyond the home territory which they had already
explored. Unknown territory is characterized by promise, because there
are new things out there, but also by intense danger. We’re prey
animals, especially millions of years ago when we were very young. We
had to go out there and encounter things that were terribly dangerous.
There was a kind of, let's say, paternal courage that went along with
that. It was the spirit of paternal courage that enabled the conquering
of the unknown, and there’s no difference between the conquering of the
unknown and the creation of habitable order. The
thing is that, as our cognitive faculties have developed to the point
where we’re capable of very high levels of abstraction, the underlying
biological architecture has remained the same. For example, when you’re
having an argument about something fundamental with someone that you
love, you’re trying to structure the world around you, jointly, to
create a habitable space that you can both exist within. You’re using
the abstracted version of the same circuits. You're using the same
circuits that our archaic ancestors would have used when they would have
went out into the unknown itself to encounter beasts, predators, and
geographical unknowns. It's the same circuit. It's just that we do it
abstractly now instead of concretely. But, of course, it has to be the
same circuit, because evolution is a very conservative force. What else
would it be? This is also why I think it’s so easy for us to demonize
those people who are our enemies. Our enemies confront us with what we
don't want to see, and, because of that, our first response is to use
snake detection circuitry on them. That accounts for our almost
immediate capacity to demonize. There’s a reason for that. It’s not a
trivial thing. First of all, it's a very fast response. And second of
all, it's a response that's worked for a very, very, very long time.
Ancient representations of reality were sort of a weird meld of observable phenomena—things we would consider objective facts—and the projection of subjective truth. I’ll show you how the Mesopotamians viewed the world. They had a model of the world as a disc. If you go out in a field at night, what does the world look like? Well, it’s a disc. It’s got a dome on top of it. That was basically the Mesopotamian view of the world, and the view of the world of people who wrote the first stories in the Bible. There was water on top of the dome. Well, obviously. It rains, right? Where does the water come from? There’s water around the dome. The disc is made of land, and then underneath that there’s water. How do you know that? Well, drill. You’ll hit water; it’s under the earth. Otherwise, how would you hit the water? And then what’s under that? Fresh water. And then what’s under that? If you go to the edge of the disc, you hit the ocean. It’s salt water. So it’s a dome with water outside of it, and then it’s a disc that the dome sits on, and then underneath that there’s fresh water, and then underneath that there’s salt water. That was roughly the Mesopotamian world.
That’s a mix of observation and imagination, because that isn’t the world, but it is the way the world appears. It’s a perfectly believable cosmology. The sun rises and the sun sets on that dome. It’s not like the thing is bloody well spinning. Who would ever think that up? It’s obvious that the sun comes up and goes down, and then travels underneath the world and comes back up again. There's nothing more self-evident than that. That’s that strange intermingling of subjectively fantasy, right at the level of perception and actually observable phenomena. All of the cosmology that’s associated with the Biblical stories is exactly like that: it’s half psychology and half reality, although the psychological is real, as well.
