Sunday, February 20, 2011

The following blogspots center on a variety of subjects, which I have initiated. You are invited to look and respond.
http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/ Not-Violence main subject
http://melnaysjanis.blogspot.com/ Temple of Janis (John) site
http://the-not-voter.blogspot.com/ Arguments for systems change
http://the4thawakening.blogspot.com/ Sacrificial crisis in Latvia

I suggest you look at the links imbedded in these blogs or at the end of the blog as an integral part of my argument.  * text between [ ] is not part of quote.
The 4th Awakening

43 Boots and Nettles
© Eso Anton Benjamins

Herewith ends the series of blogs called The4thAwakening. I may add in due course a Conclusion if it comes to mind. Those who have followed the argument will probably have realized that this series has argued for a history of Latvia with obviously severe shear marks, leaving however open the possibility that these are connected by a meme hidden within the language and able to project a kind of Forward Look that the last twenty years of renewed independence (1991-2011) have ignored in favor of reactionism against an enemy (the Soviet Union) long replaced by the European Union. Unsurprisingly, this has moved me to suggest Riga, the capital city of Latvia, as the capital city of Europe in the Europe of tomorrow, which Brussels knows nothing about. However, I present this latter argument as a discussion rather than a blog topic.

The Story of Crazy Jane and Clever John, The End
(…story begins at blog 15)

Boots and Nettles

Thus, while Rozinante and a messenger were galloping to the seashore of Livonia to fetch Clever John’s brothers, and while Clever John was converting the value of the heap of gold into money, King John 1st and Queen Ragana continued with wedding preparations.

The first thing King John did was go to his cobbler and have him make a new pair of boots, since Rozinante would return with the old pair all worn. Since he wished to dance as if he were still a young man, the King asked that his boots be inlaid with the feathers of a crane.

For her part, Queen Ragana had her hatmaker make her a crown of a crane’s black tail feathers. Everyone at the court made preparations for the event. Clever John, of course, did nothing, but count money; the princess, as promised, was not to be seen anywhere; while Crazy Jane was worried that someone should steal her dress while she danced among those who danced undressed. Just so that no one was inhibited from dancing their best, everyone was to wear a mask.

After seven days the six brothers from Livonia came riding in, this time, on the backs of six flying crickets which upon entering the King’s garden turned into six black flies.
 
The wedding ball was a big tent affair with jet fighter pilots from India among those present. All the men kneeled before the curtain behind which Princess Wonderful was hid and spoke to her words of love. Clever John almost danced his heart out.

Unfortunately, King John 1st, he whose enemies called him the Devil, did. His boots of crane feathers were too much for his age. He died in the middle of a hop for the unreachable.

Queen Ragana was in shock when the Devil died. She threw her hat of tail feathers off her head, and her true nature became revealed.

The ballroom was lit up with so much sunlight as when the Sun is at . The woman (whoever she was), whether the Sun or everyone’s Dearest Goddess, hovered as a witch would right over everyone’s head, scalped them with her heat, and declared with a queenly scream:

“You, John, are now the Devil! Hell is your kingdom, the dead are your slaves, and my daughter is your bride!”

John was taken aback by how quickly things were changing and how momentous events were not only taking place, but had overtaken him.

Not daring look anywhere else, he turned his head up to the Sun and asked: “Mother, where is your daughter?”

“Ask your brothers,” answered the Sun as she went behind a cloud, ashamed she had brought one such into the world.

Clever John turned to his brothers. “Brothers,” said Clever John, “I know that I never yet have asked you a question, because I always knew better, but do not hold this against me. Tell me where is Princess Wonderful?”

His six brothers started laughing, and all the maids of the kingdom who were at the wedding party laughed along with them.

The oldest brother of Clever John stepped forward: “Clever John, if you really do not know how to find a bride by yourself, she is waiting for you in that room,” he said and pointed to a door in the middle of the longest wall in ballroom.

As Clever John sought out the door with his eyes, everyone in the ballroom also pointed to the door and shouted: “There! There!”

Clever John started for the door. His oldest brother went to his side and offered encouragement. When they had come to the door, the brother whispered to Clever John some last minute instructions about what to do. He explained that the room had no light, and as soon as he was inside, the door behind him would be shut and locked. If he wanted his bride as hot as a hot pan, he had to jump into the bed without any hesitation—else the bride might cool off.

The brother of Clever John took him be the arm, opened the bedroom door, shoved Clever John inside, and closed the door fast behind him. Clever John jumped for the bed, which he had seen while the door had been open and was real enough.

Clever John felt a body beside him. He reached out his arm to embrace it.

It felt warm, but—then Clever John realized with an awfulness one can live without—it was inhuman. He had not embraced a Princess, but a warm plastic covered canvas bag.

Clever John screamed as if he was having a nightmare. At that very moment another door sprung open, and in strode Crazy Jane holding a huge candelabrum with dozens of burning candles. In her other hand she held the dead King John 1sts pair of crane feather boots.

Crazy Jane set the candelabrum down on a stand, then threw the boots on the bed. “They are yours now, Clever John,” she said.

“Crazy Jane! Oh Princess Wonderful! What do I do with crane-feather-boots in bed?” asked Clever John.

“Put them on and never take them off,” ordered Crazy Jane.

When Clever John hesitated, he felt a swish of leaves of nettle across his bare middle. So, he pulled on the crane feather boots and felt a warm blush seize him. A shower of sparks shot through him.

“Stop it, Crazy Jane,” Clever John begged.

All those who stood behind the door of the wedding chamber roared with laughter. Rozinante neighed.

“I am not finished,” screamed Crazy Jane and whacked Clever John with the bouquet of nettles once again.

“Help!” screamed Clever John.

“It will be okay,” suddenly all tenderness offered Crazy Jane. “Let us now run to the sauna,” she said as she pulled Clever John out of the bed.

Everyone behind the door roared with laughter once more.

Clever John followed Clever Jane. It was quite a hop he did. Those who know to look know that he was holding an object or something in his hand.

(End of story.)


Asterisks & Links of Interest

Text between [ ], when within a quote, is not part of the quote.

Monday, February 7, 2011

The following blogspots center on a variety of subjects, which I have initiated. You are invited to look and respond.
http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/ Not-Violence main subject
http://melnaysjanis.blogspot.com/ Temple of Janis (John) site
http://the-not-voter.blogspot.com/ Arguments for systems change
http://the4thawakening.blogspot.com/ Sacrificial crisis in Latvia

I suggest you look at the links imbedded in these blogs or at the end of the blog as an integral part of my argument.  * text between [ ] is not part of quote.
The 4th Awakening

42 Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
© Eso Anton Benjamins
The Story of Crazy Jane and Clever John, Part 3
(…story begins at blog 15)

Mrs. W. Ragana and her daughter Crazy Jane helped Clever John load the hoard of gold into the wagon. Rozinante, the mare, snorted in alarm as she watched how much gold she will have to pull.

Soon, King John 1st arrived at the gate. This time he was not bare foot, but wore polished boots. He wore bright green pants, a red vest ribbed with gold buttons, his suit topped off with golden epaulets, his sword, and on his head a nine tiered crown of gold inlaid with red rubies and green sapphires.

The King ordered his guards to open the garden gates and then help load onto the wagon the last of the gold.

“You have proven yourself to be the right man for my daughter, Clever John. Princes Wonderful will be pleased,” said the King. “I could not have found her a better man than you.”

“Yes, Sir King John 1st,” answered Clever John, “I have been looking forward to this moment. Perhaps I could meet your daughter and propose to her?”

As soon as Clever John had said this, he heard a low growl from the mother of Crazy Jane, the witch Ragana. It was not quite a human growl, but one like that of a lioness. The rumble made an echo in her stomach which—it was apparent—was empty.

Clever John looked up and saw Mrs. W. Ragana look at him with a menacing eye. Crazy Jane, too, stood as if frozen to the ground.

“Did I say something wrong?” asked Clever John and turned his head toward King John 1st.

“It’s alright, Clever John,” said the King and waved Crazy Jane off. He could not do so with Mrs. W. Ragana, because by now it was apparent that she was not just a witch, but the Queen herself. Clever John had mistaken her plain clothes for that of an ordinary woman. He now understood that it was a disguise all the more to fool him, which the Queen had done very well indeed.

Crazy Jane (Clever John had decided that she was the Queens Bedchamber maid), too, relaxed, but before leaving she gave Clever John a “ahahabighero” laugh. “What is your rush, Clever John?” she asked as she took Rozenante by the reigns, “We do things here in an orderly fashion. First things first, else, I will take Rozinante and lead her in the opposite direction from the castle gate.”

The King spoke. One could see that he was worried about what Crazy Jane might do. “You see, Clever John,” said King John 1st, “the custom here is not to show the bride to the groom except after the wedding ball. You will have to be a little patient.”

“That is a very strange custom,” said Clever John.

“Not so strange if you think about it,” answered the King. “The wedding ball is to get you all worked up to want to marry.”

“You mean that I must dance by myself?” asked Clever John. He was in real disbelief.

“Yes,” said the King. “There will be all kinds of beautiful maids there,” the King continued, “and they will do what they can to get you to touch them. Some of them will not be wearing clothes. But you must desist touching them. You can only talk to them and dance around them, and save the rest for the Princess. If you touch any maid, the guards will chop off your hands. The same goes for Princess Wonderful. She has to stand behind the curtains and listen to the maids tempt you, even as my young officers on the other side of the curtain make proposals to her. If she opens the curtain to look, she will lose a finger.”

“That is a crazy story,” said Clever John. I have never before heard anything so crazy in my life.”

“Don’t doubt, Clever John, my man of gold,” said the King. “If you do, you may lose your head. You see the right hand of Queen W. Ragana? Her pinky is missing, no? On our wedding ball, I made her so jealous and danced for so real that she simply had to look. Of course, my father was kind, and she lost her finger after we were married. Neither will I spoil for Princess Wonderful her wedding night with you, Clever John. But perhaps while you dance, you will address all your words of love not to the maids, but to Princess Wonderful.”

Clever John saw that King John 1st was not fooling, and neither was Queen W. Ragana. He quickly changed the subject. “When is the wedding, your Highnesses?” he asked.

“As soon as your six brothers can get here. They must come and see what comes of bathing seven crickets in the sea. The world is a marvelous place!” he said and clapped his hands in joy.

The mare Rozinante neighed. She was the only one who could protest to King John 1st so directly. She was protesting the King saying that she had been born of a cricket. The King saw that he had hurt the mare’s feelings and pursued the subject no longer, but continued to address Clever John.

“I will send Rozinante and a messenger to your family’s seaside farms,” said the King. “Rozinante can continue wearing my boots for a while yet,” King John 1st offered graciously.

Clever John paled when he discovered whose boots he had. However, the King did not let on that John had suddenly grown wise. He would let Clever John be “clever” a while longer.

“While your brothers come (and I trust that they also will bring us grand presents),” said the King, “you, Clever John, will count all the gold that we have in terms of dollars, rubles, euros, juans, and lats. It will take you a few days.”

(To be continued.)

Friday evening on “100. panta Preses Klubs, this blogger saw and heard three reporters question three distinguished Latvians, one a University professor, the other two former politicians with considerable experience. The talk centered or, better, came near to, then backed off from the theme of President, the Latvian Saeima, and the Dictator.

While the word “dictator” was mentioned only once by the philosopher, the onceness signaled that the word “authoritarian” was included in the word meme as a synonym of dictator. The two politicians were wedded to parliamentary democracy, though one believed that the current president “has no liver”, while the other said that he stuck to “figures” and was rather unemotional about being a leader. Putting it together, all the participants—reporters including—signaled that the State was dysfunctional and backed to the wall by financial destitution brought by the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank.

Meanwhile, “Al Jezeera English” released a report on the state of Latvia's forests. While the English PM spoke of Latvia as if it were the forest reserve of Europe and the PM of Latvia mumbled, the report showed the extent of the physical decimation visited on Latvia’s forests…. And of the decimation by the state of the Latvian population.


Asterisks & Links of Interest

Text between [ ], when within a quote, is not part of the quote.

*The call by one of the former Latvian Prime Ministers, Šķēle, for the federalization http://www.delfi.lv/news/national/politics/skele-rosina-diskusiju-par-es-federalas-savienibas-izveidi.d?id=36492333 of Europe may be interpreted as a surrender of Latvia to “administration” by whoever the administrators may be.

** http://politika.lv/blogi/index.php?id=62177#c ? Etimoloģija: ? Nepieklājīgi = ne + pie + klājīgi = ~ neklanīgi?

*** Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, The John Hopkins University press, 1977; originally published 1972.

Unchanged Feature: What is reality, what is myth?

Changing Feature: In the preceding posts, I started a compilation of video clips, which when seen as a linear sequence tell a story in a context which I hope will become apparent. No, I do not yet know where it is going to lead. This is a story with no end. If it began in the past (it must have), it is now moving parallel to the day we live in. Watching the film may or may not contribute to your understanding of my meaning. Put this clip as tail to your communication http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRKyDU4eRsw&playnext=1&list=PL84D9DF75487929AD do others may see. The origin of this post is at http://the4thawakening.blogspot.com/ 

Friday, February 4, 2011

The following blogspots center on a variety of subjects, which I have initiated. You are invited to look and respond.
http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/ Not-Violence main subject
http://melnaysjanis.blogspot.com/ Temple of Janis (John) site
http://the-not-voter.blogspot.com/ Arguments for systems change
http://the4thawakening.blogspot.com/ Sacrificial crisis in Latvia

I suggest you look at the links imbedded in these blogs or at the end of the blog as an integral part of my argument.  * text between [ ] is not part of quote.
The 4th Awakening

41 The Awakening of Clever John
© Eso Anton Benjamins
This is among the last of blogs of this particular series. The previous blog (40) left the consequences of the failures of the Latvian President Kārlis Ulmanis onto the shoulders of Latvia’s President today.

The unruly parliamentary democracy of Latvia, having deteriorated to a corrupt partidocracy, is unlikely to save the nation by trusting its fate to a natural, that is, gradual evolution that leads to a recovery. The fabric of the nation, which is its people, has been impoverished, demoralized, and torn to shreds by government corruption. No less, the flight of the people from the country is everyone’s existential test of how real the expectations for a better life, which was internalized through more than a century of listening to propaganda broadcast by the West concerning its wonders.

Since the disappointment of one’s home government and the West—excluding rare exceptions—must necessarily be near total, the flight of the Latvians, joined by the flight of millions of others from other parts of the world, has diminished both the spiritual and economic quality of an entire “civilization”. Given that the current financial and economic crisis is not part of some short-term cycle, but is the shaking of the foundations of presumptions unleashed a thousand years ago through the overthrow of the sacrificial traditions, the dissolution of Latvia as a nation into a de facto administrative district* of the European Union is a sign of the future facing all of Europe and beyond. In short, the era of the dissolution of nations has begun.

The process is not easy; in fact it is filled with traumas, one of which is disbelief in what is happening before our very eyes. The latter elicits from the people, this writer including, thoughts and words of revolt, even revolution. However, given that the internal energy level of the country is below the level of being able to stage a revolt—other than suffer from a verbal form of the Turrets Syndrome on its internet portals—its last hope is that the nation’s sacrificial crisis (failure of all of its leaders to lead by example being one of the forms of the crisis) is turned around by the self-sacrifice of one man, either the current president of the country, as yet a nondescript John, or a Joan of Arc who has yet to appear.

The preceding forty blogs have attempted to show among other things that pietism, as expressed by the subjective side of the Latvian language, meets today with near total denial by the public media. Indeed, this speaks as much of the Russian, German, and any other language that once upon a time had such an intimate brush with reverence for life through the endearing word. That this relationship is no more (and has to be rebuilt from scratch) is illustrated by the fact that even after a century and more of “democracy” the princely ‘shove off’ to the commoner by one insisting on being addressed as “jūs” (German = Sie; English = thou) has been rather pretentiously insisted upon by an American-Latvian journalist born in Chicago**, where to the best of this writer’s knowledge people address each other using “you”, a word that speaks of the closeness or distance of the conversationalists through the tone of inflection rather than an implicit you-me alienation.

Should we wait and hope that Clever John (the President) or Crazy Jane (Joan of Arc = Žane Vīksne) will rise from out of the Earth and save the nation? While this writer believes that he understands the mechanism through which this can happen (re meeting/closing the demands of a situation known as “sacrificial crisis”***), he suspects that it is not likely to happen. Much sooner, we are all waiting for Godot.


The Story of Crazy Jane and Clever John, Part 3
(…story begins at blog 15)

How did the gold get there?

Given that it was buried under a sand dune by the sea, the gold was most likely buried there by pirates, who had melted down some of the gold of the famed Inca Indians who had once ruled over the territory that is now Chile and Peru. Not that it mattered to Clever John. After the raven had shaken him off her back and his long fall, he lay unconscious in a sand crater on top of the gold. No one was a witness to where this happened, except for the big fish tied to the very same shore, i.e., the sea.

The sea was contemptuous of Clever John. She had expected him to return with news that the Sun would untie her from the shore, and that she could rise and go fly to some less boring place, one where perhaps there grew palm trees and at high tide coconuts fell into her waters. Instead, Clever John had returned, she could not tell whether dead or alive, but certainly unconscious.

It did not take long for the sea to make up her mind what to do. She rolled her waves ever higher as if she were standing on a swing. When the waves had reached the height of some hundred feet, she let them go as if from a sling. A tail or, better, a hundred tails of monstrous size swung to the shore, then hit the dune, the pile of gold, and Clever John with such might that it was all thrown into the air.

Clever John and his pile of gold sailed higher and higher, and then came lower and lower, until it came down before the very gates of King John 1st. It was a curious thing that standing at the gate at that very time was Clever John’s mare Rozinante. Crazy Jane and her mother, the proprietor of the Witch’s Wayside Inn, were also there. They were the ones who had yoked Rozinante to a wagon just large enough to hold Clever John’s hoard of gold.

The moment that Clever John hit the ground, he woke up. The first thing he saw was the pile of shining gold, the Rozinante, his mare, then Crazy Jane, and then the Witch. Clever John had to rub his eyes.

“Hi, Clever John,” said Crazy Jane. “I believe that you and my mother have met.” Rozinante shook her large head to indicate that she knew it to be true.

Clever John stood up and brushed the sand off himself. “Yes, hello, Mrs. Ragana,” he said. “So, what happened?”

“Don’t worry,” answered Crazy Jane as she handed the reigns of Rozinante to her mother. “You had an experience to last you a lifetime.”

(To be continued.)


Asterisks & Links of Interest

Text between [ ], when within a quote, is not part of the quote.

*The call by one of the former Latvian Prime Ministers, Šķēle, for the federalization of Europe may be interpreted as a surrender of Latvia to “administration” by whoever the administrators may be.

** The elevated Latvian "Jūs". Etimology: ? Nepieklājīgi = ne + pie + klājīgi = ~ neklanīgi?

*** Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, The John Hopkins University press, 1977; originally published 1972.

Unchanged Feature: What is reality, what is myth?

Changing Feature: In the preceding posts, I started a compilation of video clips, which when seen as a linear sequence tell a story in a context which I hope will become apparent. No, I do not yet know where it is going to lead. This is a story with no end. If it began in the past (it must have), it is now moving parallel to the day we live in. Watching the film may or may not contribute to your understanding of my meaning. Put this clip as a tail to your communication so http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFGR-s-M8Fo&feature=related
others may see. The origin of this post is at http://the4thawakening.blogspot.com/