=SCSA_AA1 *** ZOWIE FOR HOWIE %%% ================================================================ START DEEP6 of FOOTNOTES (sa) to =aa1, starting with =scaa1a =============================================================== (aa1-4a) [ or a little girl, since, as far as I know, the mitzva of benching and of shaking lulav is not restricted to males -- tho I do not know if it is obligatory for women as well as men -- colme to think of it, I do not recall seeing a woman shake a lulav at Mevo Modi'in -- though Dafna used to say, Sukot was her favorite holiday, since there was so much to do then ] (aa1-5a) And this is my poem (from "Crazy Louie and the Bum") "THE LAST OF CRAZY LOUIE" Crazy Louie haCohen climbed the hill from the Bet Zayit bamboo_and_straw_thatch chich_chack__shacks to holy Har Nof where he met a black_and_white snake who said 'We all have a place; mine's here, yours ain't and drove him ("to hell in a hand_basket") to the airport. (ca. 1986, rewritten Campra sivaN '05 -- this is Lou Kessler, one of the three Founding Partners of the Intellectual Stock Exchange (Eliahu Gal-Or, President), the Midrahov, Jerusalem, of whom we have not heard sense. Maybe he went home to Mama and Papa in Galutz, Philadelphia (as W.C. Fields seys, the terms are synonymous) who then locked him up in a nuthouse, and maybe by now he's dead. Like Buddha said, I'd weep but who has tears enough or a spae Grand Canyon or maybe a section of the Jordan Rift above Jericho in Israeli_occupied__Israel to make an ocean to put them all in .) (aa1-7a) [ So its clear enough that RSC as a rather young man was making forays into existentialist philosophy -- or more precisely, 'existentialist metaphysics' -- but its my present impression that careful analysis of what he said would show that he didn't get real far into it -- or one might better say, was breakinng the ground for Jewish existentialist philosphy, largely influenced by -- is it Lurianic mysticism -- the tzim_tzum__guy -- this was Yitzak Luria, haAri of Zfat, do I remember correct -- ] (aa1-7b) Well, some is and some ain't. Our way is, of course -- this is the old S.O.(W) -- but some of theirs maybe ain't. Like, Rajaneeshe Chaotic Meditation -- which attracted primarily yuppie psychologists of above_median income whose prefered recreation is attending a Thursday or Friday evening orgy -- was maybe the latter. TM was stress-reduction -- harmless, but more nearly secular than religious -- and Harry Krishner was for pre_lobs and ex_cons who like sweet snacks -- there is something in the air at night, you know. Stars, and night (aa1-8a) (aa1-8a) [and one of the reasons I'm now at Campra, where we're usually 9 short of a minyan, rather than at Moshav Mevo Modi'in, is that there you can't see the Milky Way. Once, for Security, I had one of those bright Arcturus Galaxy Mercury-vapour blue_white lights in front of my personal re_inforced__concrete bungalow #104 (there are 8 of them at the Moshav, but the numbers start with #101, to make the place look bigger) At my request, Eliahu Gal-Or climbed up the tower, past the safety barrier, and disabled it.] At night the lowest creature knows deep down I'm here for something deeper than just making money. (aa1-8b) (aa1-8b) and so, for a moment, even the moles stop mining coal (I'm caught up in the wake of that song, "Big Mole", from Kurt Weill's liberetto for "Lost in the Stars".) (aa1-9r) "What's the force that makes you scared to belittle yourself. Makes you scared of making yourself nothing before G_d. I don't know -- something blocks -- [ but I think the questioner means 'humble' if not 'annihilate' -- not 'belittle'.] (aa1-9a) To 'belittle' is to deny one's higher being; to 'humble' is shuck off some of one's klippot, one's false but socially convenient personality. To 'annihilate' is a very crude conception of 'to attain ego-loss' -- very crude, because , PVK teaches, ego-loss cannot be achieved by will. And also, you better not go for it unless you got enough ballast in your balloon, Daddy-o. Hasidus says -- a wife, and "a belly_full of halacha" -- and also enough years so that you care more about finding a clean restroom than storming the Winter Palace. A bit of physical infirmity keeps a person grounded, as_it_is_said, "barefoot in the summer and pregnant in the winter" But I digress. ] (aa1-9q) [ I do not know what RSC means by 'being__or__not_being' ] Maybe close to Satre's 'existence' (in Sartre's contradisction to 'essence' ) -- which indicates, maybe, the everyday humdurm ] until they reach the level of G_d choosing us or us choosing G_d, which is deeper than free choice, everything is part of the free choice level, right. (aa1-9s) [ RSC clearly does not use 'free choice' in Spinoza's sense, of a mind freed from the passions of its personality, choosing from a state of enlightenment amongst what PVK calls the 'Divine Emotions'. Or Leary's aphorism, "Freedom consists in playing games of one's own choosing. (Leary was an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard, so he must have read Spinoza's Ethics.) Rather, RSC seems to use 'free choice' in the the sort of putdown_of_secularism sense that Pope Ratzinger will no doubt rub in the faces of his diminishing sheep for the next decade and a half. ] [You know, if I wake up] in the morning and I have free choice to put on tfilin or not to put them on , its very holy, but then while I'm puttin on the tfilin its deeper than free choice. (aa1-12a) (aa1-12a) [ Similarly, PVK often says (my paraphrase): A bum has no obligations -- he can do whatever he chooses, within his means -- so you think he is the most free type in the world, but in truth, he is the least free. Well, we cam see that a bum -- who, by definition if not in fact has left all obligations behind -- job, family, even his destiny - is not free -- and so a Midrash that I heard from one of the Witt kids says -- Essav came upon Jakob and said, I will kill you, and Yakov said, do not kill me, just take all my money, because the Talmud says, one who has no money is as one who is dead. So ok, maybe a bum is not free, but whaat would you say of a millionaire Playboy - paradigmatically, Reginald van Gleason III - - ("Thomas O'Neil -- da Turd" -- "ADMITT Thomas O'Neil -- da Turd" (reportedly heard at the opening of a Legislative Season at the Boston State House ) -- Because again, "a picture held us captive" (Wittgensein), and the picure was the atmoistic presupposition that underlies what I call empiricist epistemology -- so here we have passed from theory of knowlege to theory of action, shleppping our same atomisit cpresuppsiion with -- but here the Subject is not the perceiver, but the act_er. And here too we can take the Kantian approach as a conceptual solution -- for to borrow a theme from the conclusion of Hesse's SteppenWolf ("you have stabbed the illusion of a woman with the illusion of a knife" (quoting from memory)) and instead of saying, our perception comes to us necessarily and inextricably conceptualized -- we say, our actions occur in a context of responsibilities, and he who acts independent of such responsibilities, has divested his own actions of most of their significance. As the gambit goes, "I am tempted to say that" -- both our problems and their solution are merely conceptual, not real. And that is Wittgenstein's remark,which so infuriated Marcuse -- Ricky Sherover told me that, when she was studying from Marcuse at Brandeis, ca. 1964 -- "Philosophy leaves everything as it is." But too, and this is Kant's point, concepts are real enough too, one can be killed by them -- as PVK says, "people kill each other for their opinions." [ Whats 'they're better ] than you, you're better han me. I have four Ph.d's you have only 3 Ph.d's'. It's all nonense, right. Then momish you're above all this nonsense. (aa1-13a) (aa1-13a) [ And of course this is HIK's prayer, "Raise us above the distinctions and differences that divide us." ] (aa1-14ac) CAST OF CHARACTERS (and Characters they were) [ So this is most likely BILL RICHMAN, Famous Tree Planter at Mevo Modi'in and subsequent (32 years later) Victor in the Battle of Billy's Trees, at that time a dropout Assistant Distric Attorney or some such with the Chicago Prosecutor's Office, where he tended to side with the Defendant rather than the State, because he felt sorry for the former and no doubt reckoned the latter could take care of itself. ] [ Incidentally, R. Zalman has an article, 1960's if I recall, "And they bow down to darkness and the Void" where he argues that this line from the Alenu does not apply to the "void" of Zen Buddhism. ] "But when you're way up there, you say Satchadonanda, are you even thinking that he has another tradition? (aa1-15a) (aa1-15a) [ OK, a few points. First of all, Bill missed and RSC evoked, the Zen 10 Oxherding pictures. Or rather, this is not hte middle picture, "the man and the ox lost in the clouds" but rather, it is maybe the last picture, "returning home with grace-giving hands." And that is also Ram Dass's remark, in Be Here Now (Lama Foundation, ca. 1970, republished ?one of the Harper's?) , 'just because you're way up in 7th Heaven [ my paraphrase] "you don't have to forget your ZipCode And also this is Leary's critique of Ram Dass's path: Leary said, you should first actualize the particulars of your identity -- your biologic sexual identity (rather than acting out its psychologic and sociologic distortions, I would say), and also your ethnic identity. OK, that was for me a better_than_average footnote. ] "But even when you're way up there, are you even thinking this is a woman." (aa1-15b) So this is Leary, in 'Psychedlic Prayers', his "Imitation" (to use Pound's term) of the Tao Te Ching: "One to me is pain and gain / said the mind to the brain / watching with comopassionate detatchment / as a handsome woman inspected a small blemish on her thigh" (aa1-16a) And is my desire for a woman less proper than my desire for an apple. Well, I can do more things wrong in seeking to consumate the former. With an apple, about all I can do wrong, within reason rather than fantasy, is to steal it or to -- prehend, Whitehead would say -- it "before its time". (aa1-16b) As_it_is_said (reportedly by Jesus) 'the meek shall inherit the earth' if I'm on the leel of AhUAv Ha_MMTzI'aT , really there, on the contraray, I'm really aware. Not less aware. (aa1-17a) (aa1-17a) Ok, sports fans: I think we can clarify this distinction by applying PVK's temrinology. In that terminology, Billy is sepaking of 'samadhi with closed eyes' [ ie, samadhi beyond existence ], while RSC is speaking of 'samadhi with open eyes'. "But could it be like if you're on top of a mountain, you wouldn't say, what a beautiful mountain. You would say, what a beautiful place this is. And if you are in a valley you wouldn't say this is a beautiful valley -- " (aa1-17b> (aa1-17b> [ Billy seems here to be arguing that the essential form of predication is relational. So if your consciousness has transcended relational conceptualization, you ain't gonna be able to say nothing nohow, Chou. But PVK's conceptualization suggests that one transcends conventional relationships, and then parceives the archetypal relationships. "Just a thought." ] The whole idea that women have to stop being women because its not holy, this is a very low kind of holiness. (aa1-20a) (aa1-20a) [ This is a critique of the ultra_orthodox notion of snias, of standards of modesty for women. ] (aa1-23a) [ I really don't know if the 'Zohar Kodesh' is kodesh, and if so, how much so. One would expect to find that it holds a fair share and more of medieval shtuyot. ] (aa1-24a) [ Don't need the basement of a skyscraper either, because nobody's going to rent it for office space. PVK has suggested that center of the galaxy may be rather essential, I forget for precisely what. Maybe its why we're not still crawling on our bellies in the swamps. ] (aa1-24b) [ You mean to say, I suppose, that the stars are doing the best they can. Please excuse me, I seem to have blundered into a Doublas Adams script, is it "This Way to the Egress" (P.T. Barnum). ] Theres just a light which is momish there. its momish there, just there. (aa1-24c) (aa1-24c) [ This seems to be a very groping attempt to present what HIK more tidily terms the 'all-pervading light'. That is a term from mysticism; if I recall, PVK suggests that the physical analogue is some sort of interstellar photon plasma.] (aa1-27a) [ I grew up in an assimilated home. My father had a traditional Jewish upbringing -- Hebrew school and all that -- and had chosen to spare his children that burden, though they did have Seder's with friends, before I was born, and I learned quite young to be proud that I was Jewish, and to accept that as an obligtion to help other oppressed peoples. This was in the USA 1940's. I had often wished that I could have fought in World War II to save our people. No doubt I would have gotten shot the first time I stepped outside the mess-hall. So anyhow, at about the time I should have been studying for bar mitzva, I was learning my Yiddishkeit from 'The Treasury of Jewish Folklore'. I think there is no mystic teaching too profound to be trivialized past recognition therein. So here is the joke that goes with this RSC teaching, ostensibly about the stars: "Which is more important -- the sun or the mmon." / "The moon." The moon? "The moon." Why. The sun shines in the daytime. But the moon shines at night, when we really need the light. While I'm on the subject: Consider the daily Tachunun in the Siddur. "Let us fall into the hands of the LORD, but into the hands of man let me not fall." Kurt Vonnegut, l'havdil, says: "There is no such thing as a free lunch." So ok: From the Treasury of Jewish Folklore. This Czar's Jewish servant bought the Czar a fish. But the fish stank. So the servant was given a choice: eat the fish, or get 40 lashes. The servant chose to eat the fish, but half way through he could not bear it, and chose the lashes. Which he could not bare either. And so in a spiritual crisis, you may try to fight it out in the spiritual realm, or in realworld terms. And neither is eay. ] (aa1-27b) [ And again, PVK will often say of the uncreated light, that this is what you find when you 'turn within', that is, into what is called the Void, but which is neither Void, nor is, precisely speaking, 'tohu v_bohu', though at first it seems such, but is more nearly, one might say, the realm of all_possibilities. ] (aa1-3.14149265358979 "How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy chapters involving quantum mechamics I want you to I am as frum as it gets hereabouts in the lower alps. I am chewing a bit of Sbrinz washed down with a kazayis of Chateuaneuf du Pape, but I make kiddish only over Barbera or Chianti. I mean, it was merely a protectionist tariff. And I then I definitely decide I'll never throw this person out. (aa1-30a) (aa1-30a) And that is my kavanah for netillat yadayim. I wash my hands in cold water and let them dry in the sun -- this works better ina Modi'in summer than a Swiss winter -- and as they are slowly drying (or icicles forming, as the case may be) , I think of all the people I would like to hit, and one by one I negate each thought. Which may make tactical sense, for I would be overmatched by anyone over the age of 3 -- well, 4 if they're short. -------------------------------------------------------- GET =scsaaa1b ================================================================== *** ZOWIE FOR HOWIE *** This, starting with =scaa1f , will be the 2nd set of Footnotes to =sc_aa1 , and will be docname =scsaaa1b , and will be appeneded to =scsaaa1a, OK? OK. Bring Back Dr. Bronner's Pepperimint Soap =============================================================== PART II OF FOOTNOTES TO =sc_aa1 Starting with Footnotes to Ms. page 28, taken from =scaa1f ================================================================ (aa1-28a) [ Excuse me, but who was this turkey? And why to we read him? ] (aa1-28br) REFERENCE: PiRQeI AvOT 3:4 (Metsudah Sioddur translation. Rabbi Chaninah ben Chachina says: He who keeps awake at night, or travels alone on the road, and makes room in his heart for idleness, sins against himself. (AA1-28cR) RABi ChaNINA BeN ChaKINAI AOMeR: HaNe'OR B_LaILaH , who keeps awake at night V_Ha_M_Ha_LaKh B_DeReKh YHIDI, and who travels on the raod alone V_PaNeH Lv_I L_vataLa and makes roomH in his heart for idlemess HeRi ZeH M_TCHaIev B_NeFeSh_O is like one who kills his soul So the translation does not support the fire_and_brimestone reading RSC gives to this passage. But the translation is a bit euphemistic; the original Hewbrew, as RSC points out, does seem to support RSC's paraphrase, to some extent. That is: M_TCHaIev B_NeFeSh_O is rather euphemistically translated "sins against himself", my translation is "kills his soul", though RSC's paraphrase "you bring your own death with your own hands" seems a bit too much, and he seems to have carried himself away with his interpretative commentary "Cause you momish deserve, (G_d forbid), you have no right to live." (aa1-28bra) When I came back to New Buffalo, Susie Harrison , zl'b, was still there, and though I had burned out her love for me, at least to the point that it could no longer sustain a relationship, especially in one of thoe one-room Adobe's, we would still be friends, and I would make running jokes with her -- or maybe that was before we broke up, when the fires were banked but still gave warmth -- so anyhow, one of those jokes was over the Antonioni movie, which I never saw, 'Zabriskie Point', and I would make mutliple puns on that title, which she found funny, one was, 'Ze Bra Ski Point ' -- Susie always insisted that the Beattles sing, "Oobla die, oobla da, life goes on -- Bra!" -- where I hear the last word as simply "La!" This may not be philosophy on the level that one has a right to except from even a dropout graduate school student, but such trivia can make the mortar for the bricks of the house of a relationship. OK, so now to my point: I mean, the tragedy of suicide is one who commits suicide imagines that he has no right to live, but in fact has for more right to live than most of those upon whom he is splattered. The Catholics correctly note that suicide is a mortal sin, and sad to say, suicides most likely go to hell for a long time -- though PVK remarks, "damnation is not eternal" -- so sad to say, there is no doubt sound psychic reason for burying them in a seperaate section of the cemetary -- I mean, really, here I am at last studying Talmud in the Academy of Sura, and I really don't want some next- door neighbor crying day and night, 'Dorothy Parker was right, "nooses give, gas smells awful, you might as well live". Also I want to say -- whenever I take the bus back up the hill from Biasca I nod off, and the trip is an eternity, because I am half-awake in a time frame that is measured by the sequence of my thoughts, and you can put 1000 thoughts in the time it takes to make one fart -- so purgatory time is going to be a thousand times longer than real time , and Uncle Fred may have gone through a thousand years of purgatory torments in the time it took me to nick one roast beef and a bottle of Jameson's Best from the table at the Wake. Chana, zl'b, who lived at the Abode and founded the Canaan Family, took her own life when they put her in a mental hospital -- now to me it seems that with all their drugs they embalm your soul, and that truly is idolatry, yet for years I think I saw her running frantically, ceaselessly, over the hills above the Abode, trying to find and take back the life she threw away. Gretchen Grossner, zl'b, was dying of cancer, and took her own life. That is a crime against the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and those who commit such a crime are automatically committed to a mental hospital, at least for a while. And so it seemed to me that she had made and end run into the goal zone. Somoene asked PVK once about suicide, and he said, well, if there is really nothing left that you can do on earth -- they had a short memorial service for her at Interface, in Watertown. She left me a crockery jug, that I had wanted for making beer but she was using for her laundry -- I eventually gave it to Haverate Shalom, hoping they would make kiddish wine in it -- so anyone, I sketched a poem that had the lines "We who would rage needs sing eulogy" and concluded "the New Year past, my sister died just one more carcinogenocide" and I wanted to add -- for she had been Chair of the Columbia Student Peace Union when I went to grad school there in '63, and it was from her -- 'role-model' I suppose you would say -- that I spent a few years as a leader in the NYC SPU -- so I wanted to add, "but tell me, where is the next picket line" -- nice sentiment, though too corny for words -- and it seemed to me she replied, that is something you have to find out for yourself. From which we can learn, as it is taught in the School of Woody Allen, that they don't deliver The New York Times to Heaven, at least not on a daily basis. So what I am saying is, here was a case where suicide was no sin against oneself, and where the Heavenly Court executes no Final Judgement. And as I have often said, P.W. Bridgeman, dying of cancer, shot himself , and left a note, as my father told me at the time, that read, as I recall hearing him say, "It is indecent for a society to make a man do this to himself." Well, I fear that in writing about suicide I may be missing lunch, so I'll close this now. (AA1-28DR) So the translation does not support the fire_and_brimestone reading RSC gives to this passage. But the translation is a bit euphemistic; the original Hewbrew, as RSC points out, does seem to support RSC's paraphrase, to some extent. That is: M_TCHaIev B_NeFeSh_O is rather euphemistically translated "sins against himself", my translation is "kills his soul", though RSC's paraphrase "you bring your own death with your own hands" seems a bit too much, and he seems to have carried himself away with his interpretative commentary "Cause you momish deserve, (G_d forbid), you have no right to live." (aa1-29a) And that is my kavanah for netillat yadayim. I wash my hands in cold water and let them dry in the sun -- this works better ina Modi'in summer than a Swiss winter -- and as they are slowly drying (or icicles forming, as the case may be) , I think of all the people I would like to hit, and one by one I negate each thought. Which may make tactical sense, for I would be overmatched by anyone over the age of 3 -- well, 4 if they're short. we were learning a few times, the whole Torah is really one. One (aa1-30a) (aa1-30a) [ and similarly, PVK speaks of "a wave that emerges as the sea." And in Leibniz, each monad is a minaturized mirror of the Whole ] So the thing is, if I'm on that level then suddenly I'm on this tremendous eternity level, then everything which goes areound in time can not reach me, right. Just can't reach me. Pople can not get angry with me. The little dog in the house wants to bark at me, cant, you know. (aa1-31a) (aa1-31a) [ So this is an interesting take, and suggests and interesting midrash, on that line in Exodus, "Not one dog shall whet its tongue." ]