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

http://oedipusrexrewritten.blogspot.com/ Oedipus Rex Rewritten

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 4^th 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 1^st. 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?

http://www.voltairenet.org/article167588.html

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/