My friend Bob, who does the tech work for my books in the free internet libraries and our podcast, reactivated the YouTube channels for The Redneck Mystic Lawyer Podcast and its successor, The Redneck Mystic Podcast. Here are the links.
There are a lot of episodes. We know YouTube changed the title of two episodes, and shortened one episode by half, and that may have happened with other episodes.
We will not put anything new at those YouTube channels. We will continue putting new podcast episodes on Torrent platforms in America and around the globe.
Bob created a new YouTube channel, Not So Sweet Home Alabama, onto which he put two episodes. which previously were put on Torrent, and there will be more episodes at the new channel.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAzZLR-zoOepyyh3Gq6ap1w
Yesterday, I got involved in something at Erik Rittenberry’s Poetic Outlaws and later wished I had stayed out of it, but it was on my plate when I woke up yesterday morning and found it in my email inbox.
As further preface, I say again that Bob and I were dragooned by angels known in the Bible, who stood us before endless mirrors looking at ourselves, and the angels did lots of other things to us, and it changed our perspectives of ourselves and of everything else.
Here is what I got involved in yesterday morning, which continued through yesterday and into this morning.
It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.
— Cioran
One of my favorite writers is the cranky, old, pessimistic Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran. I read him often. For me, his sentences are pure poetry laced with uncomfortable truths. You don’t have to agree with everything he says to enjoy the wisdom of his writing.
The irony is that his pessimistic ponderings lift my spirit in strange ways. Perhaps it’s because he reminds us of what we already know on a deeper level but are conditioned to ignore or deny. He helps us remove our rose-colored glasses so as to come face to face with naked reality. He reminds us that “the more we are dispossessed, the more intense our appetites and our illusions become.”
Susan Sontag once said:
“Cioran is one of the most delicate minds of real power writing today. Nuance, irony, and refinement are the essence of his thinking…
An argument is to be ‘recognized,’ and without too much help. Good taste demands that the thinker furnish only pithy glimpses of intellectual and spiritual torment. Hence, Cioran’s tone— one of immense dignity, dogged, sometimes playful, often haughty. But for all of what may appear arrogance, there is nothing complacent in Cioran, unless it be his very sense of futility and his uncompromisingly elitist attitude toward the life of the mind…”
Below is a brief essay by Cioran from his brilliant little book, A Short History of Decay. I hope you enjoy it.
Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude. For each of us will do anything in order not to be doomed to himself.
Our kind is not a fatality but the temptation to fail. Incapable of keeping our hands clean and our hearts undiluted, we soil ourselves upon contact with strange sweats, we wallow—craving for disgust and fervent for pestilence—in the unanimous mud.
And when we dream of seas changed into holy water, it is too late to dive into them, and our advanced state of corruption keeps us from drowning there: the world has infested our solitude; upon us the traces of others become indelible.
In the gamut of creatures, only man inspires a sustained disgust. The repugnance which an animal begets is provisional; it never ripens in thought, whereas our kind obsesses our reflections, infiltrates the mechanism of our detachment from the world in order to confirm us in our system of refusal and non-adherence.
After each conversation, whose refinement alone is enough to indicate the level of a civilization, why is it impossible not to regret the Sahara and not to envy the plants or the endless monologues of zoology? If with each word we win a victory over nothingness, it is only the better to endure its reign.
We die in proportion to the words which we fling around us . . . Those who speak have no secrets. And we all speak. We betray ourselves, we exhibit our heart; executioner of the unspeakable, each of us labors to destroy all the mysteries, beginning with our own.
And if we meet others, it is to degrade ourselves together in a race to the void, whether in the exchange of ideas, schemes, or confessions. Curiosity has provoked not only the first fall but the countless ones of every day of our lives. Life is only that impatience to fall, to fail, to prostitute the soul’s virginal solitudes by dialogue, ageless and everyday negation of Paradise.
Man should listen only to himself in the endless ecstasy of the intransmissible Word, should create words for his own silences and assents audible only to his regrets. But he is the chatterbox of the universe; he speaks in the name of others; his self loves the plural. And anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.
Politicians, reformers, and all who rely on a collective pretext are cheats. There is only the artist whose lie is not a total one, for he invents only himself. Outside of the surrender to the incommunicable, the suspension amid our mute and unconsoled anxieties, life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.
(The implicit plural of “one” and the avowed plural of “we” constitute the comfortable refuge of false existence. Only the poet takes responsibility for “I,” he alone speaks in his own name, he alone is entitled to do so.
Poetry is bastardized when it becomes permeable to prophecy or to doctrine: “mission” smothers music, idea shackles inspiration. Shelly’s “generous” aspect cripples most of his work; Shakespeare, by a stroke of luck, never “served” anything.
The victory of non-authenticity is fulfilled in philosophical activity, that complacence in “one,” and in prophetic activity [whether religious, moral, or political], that apotheosis of “we.”
Definition is the lie of the abstract mind; inspired formula the lie of the militant one; a definition is always the cornerstone of a temple; a formula inescapably musters the faithful. Thus all teachings begin. How then fail to turn to poetry? It has, like life, the excuse of proving nothing.)
Sloan BashinskySloan’s Newsletter
Heh, did Cioran ever take his own advice and simply shut up?
Poetic Outlaws
Author
He wrote most of his life and he'd likely respond to your comment with this:
"The wise man's life is empty and sterile, for it is free from contradiction and despair. An existence full of irreconcilable contradictions is so much richer and creative. The wise man's resignation springs from inner void, not inner fire. I would rather die of fire than of void.”
Sloan Bashinsky
Heh, I have only wrote for half of my life, and it was tens of thousands of pages of non-fiction, verse, fiction and stranger than fiction, as if I had turned into paper, pen and ink, or typewriter, ribbon and paper, or a computer and keyboard. I’ve had copious oceans of both fire and void, irreconcilable contradictions and despairs, and so has everyone I have ever known, wise or dumb as a rock :-).
Do you happen to know what Cioran’s life was like? He was a hermit? He mixed and mingled with people? He took risks in life that could have killed him or had him live on the street? He got his heart broken and mangled and put through a wood chipper a few dozen times, or even once? Did he live outside of his mind?
I read at Wikipedia just now that he suffered greatly from insomnia in his youth, I went through a patch of that in my teens and it nearly drove me insane. It seems from what I read at Wikipedia, he spent most of his life in his head, academia, talking with smart people and philosophers and movements. He very much admired Adolf Hitler.From Wikipedia.In 1933, he received a scholarship to the University of Berlin, where he studied Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Hegel, Edmund Husserl, Immanuel Kant, Georg Simmel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.[3] Here, he came into contact with Klages and Nicolai Hartmann. While in Berlin, he became interested in the policies of the Nazi regime, contributed a column to Vremea dealing with the topic (in which Cioran confessed that "there is no present-day politician that I see as more sympathetic and admirable than Hitler",[6] while expressing his approval for the Night of the Long Knives—"what has humanity lost if the lives of a few imbeciles were taken"),[7] and, in a letter written to Petru Comarnescu, described himself as "a Hitlerist".[8] He held similar views about Italian fascism, welcoming victories in the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, arguing that: "Fascism is a shock, without which Italy is a compromise comparable to today's Romania".[9]
Poetic Outlaws
Author
He was apolitical as all greats were. Wikipedia, that dubious info forum, delivers out-of-context facts and false narratives. You should know better. The truth is, Conservatives deemed him an anarchist and a communist. Liberals deemed him a fascist. Both sides always try to categorize those who transcend the partisan trap.
Anyway, Cioran paid no attention to others' opinions. He wrote fiercely and bravely, never to appease the anemic sensibilities of the masses.
He once said: “Our opinions are tumors which destroy the integrity of our nature and nature itself.”
Sloan Bashinsky
Wikipedia invented he admired Hitler?
Poetic Outlaws
Author
We have to remember that most intellectuals of the time did. Including Americans. Heidegger was brilliant but he too got swept up in the dictator's spell. I've told you before, this page isn't for puritans. I post the wisdom of profound thinkers here regardless of the ideological traps they've succumbed.
Sloan Bashinsky
Erik, I love what you do here, and I’ve told many people about it. However, I am not impressed by anyone getting swept up by Adolph Hitler. A very similar thing is happening in America, and its kingpin has made statements of admiration about Hitler, and he studied a book of Hitler’s speeches when he was married to Ivana, and he recently spoke admiringly of the despots ruling Russia, Red China and North Korea, and in 2016 his vice president pick likened him to Hitler, and photos of his Mega rallies, the Jan 6 insurrection, and where he got shot show his base is white people, a picture’s worth a thousand words. He recently told his evangelical base that if he wins this time, they won’t have to ever vote again. His vice president running mate wrote the Foreword for the Project 25 right wing Christian takeover of America, which they say will be bloodless, if the left allows it to be bloodless.
Poetic Outlaws
Author
I don't think it's that serious my friend and I think the Left in this country are equally abhorrent. I despise both parties with passion but the Left has a firmer grip on this nation, especially in academia and media. It might be best just to ignore some of the upcoming posts I have in store. Cioran, to me, is unrivaled in wit and wisdom. As he once said, "I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?"
Sloan Bashinsky
I have a friend who had contracts taken out on his life by local government officials because of the heat he was putting on them in county commission meetings and getting them prosecuted, and they were MAGAS, and hit men nearly killed him and he has been in hiding ever since. I don’t know if you rub against MAGAS regularly, but I do, and they are unhinged. I don’t care for the American left, either, but they don’t remind of Germany leading up to WW II, and Trump and his base do. You discredit yourself when you argue this former Hitler lover really wasn’t, and when you excuse it because lots of intelligent people were same.
Poetic Outlaws
Author
I don't "excuse" it, I just don't give a damn. I've posted communist sympathizers here also but I never remember you getting mad over that. I live in the south so I'm quite familiar with the MAGA crowd and most of them are hardworking, harmless, family oriented people tired of getting screwed over by the political apparatus. There's extremists on the fringes on both sides of the political divide and I despise them. I created this page as a refuge from politics but some people can't help bringing it up at all times. This country is over-politicized to the core and I don't like it.Sloan BashinskyI know Stalin killed millions of Jews and Gypsies, and if you published something by someone who was dazzled by Stalin, I would respond about the same. The void is very different from the flames, both are very important to soul evolution, and both, in their own way, are, well, not best sellers.
EthanIf you don’t mind me intervening here, in my opinion he does not discredit himself as long as he does not promote violence or indignity, (and he doesn’t) and as long as he’s opened to dialogue, offering others the chance to speak their minds freely…
I find this to be a sign of respect and appreciation that worth being responded in the same manner.So learn to “agree to disagree” without trying to impose anything on anyoneSloan BashinskyI’m not mad, I just don’t cotton to this guy in the context of his infatuation with Hitler.Poetic OutlawsHe wasn’t infatuated. He said one snarky comment. He hated all politicians and ideologies.
As he said:
“In itself, every idea is neutral, or should be; but man animates ideas, projects his flames and flaws into them; impure, transformed into beliefs, ideas take their place in time, take shape as events: the trajectory is complete, from logic to epilepsy . . . whence the birth of ideologies, doctrines, deadly games.“
EthanIs it fair to burn down one’s life work when his political views did NOT bleed into his writings? In my understanding his adherence to the far right ideology was a stupidity of youth that he regretted later.
I too love Cioran for a number of reasons none of which have anything in common with far right political view. I love controversial minds who do not adhere to pretested formulas of thinking. I feel life pulsating in them far more than it does within those who choose the straight, neat path all the time that can only lead where everyone else is going
Oh, and one more question if I may, for you made a reference to “flames” and “void” that sparked my curiosity. What do you know of them, and don’t speak to me of angels with flaming swords!
Have you tried walking on a path on which no one else is going, so much so that your thirst (mental/emotional one) meets no one to hand you a glass of water? A path where you cannot find any mercy other than yours, if any? A path where your screams are mute as if trapped in a void where sounds cannot travel? Try such a journey and maybe you’ll understand a thing or two about Coiran’s writings.Certainly they are not for everybody. Neat souls sense danger into them for many reasons having nothing to do with politics 😉Sloan BashinskyThe Void is a metaphysical place in space, time, eternity, infinity, which is alien to all but a few. The Flames are the baptism in fire and in spirit, which John the Baptist said Jesus would administer. Both are core in any spiritual tradition.I had never heard of Cioran when I read Erik’s post today. For me, there was something surreal shrill and, I dunno, conceited? megalomanic? I know, you don’t? in Cioran’s rant, diatribe.After Erik replied to me, I decided to see what Cioran was about, and as I usually do when I want a general sense of someone who might be well known, say the Sufi mystic poet Rumi and his irascible teacher Shams, I went to Wikipedia, and when I read about Cioran’s infatuation with Hitler, I thought that might explain his his psyche’s workings a bit, for how could anyone become infatuated with Hitler and move on unscathed, but did Cioran ever face himself down In a deep mirror and come to terms with it?
"Definition is the lie of the abstract mind; inspired formula the lie of the militant one; a definition is always the cornerstone of a temple; a formula inescapably musters the faithful. Thus all teachings begin. How then fail to turn to poetry? It has, like life, the excuse of proving nothing.)”
Really?EthanHaha, at first I raised an eyebrow when reading this quote too, and then at a second thought I begun to see it differently. He probably did not think at “definition” in mathematical terms because definitions are the very foundation of many mathematical concepts.
In more general terms though, definition is the cornerstone for many fanatical manifestations be them political, religious and so on. (Cioran has the experience of two fanatical regimes he ended up despising and a close connection to religion in childhood as his father was a priest. He rebelled against religion too later in life)
When it comes to humans, definitions prove nothing for life is more fluid than that and can rarely be framed into definitions.
In my opinion Cioran’s infatuation comes not from political reasons but from excessive loneliness.All of my life so far I tried to identify connection points with the world around (at emotional/intellectual level) and I gloriously failed every time. The older I get the more I resonate with Cioran’s isolation from the world.Sloan BashinskyIt was his view of poetry that caused me to say, really?EthanI know, I had the same train of thoughts when I read that fragment 😃. I needed to mention the part about definition, in order to be able to explain this. Putting everything in frames imposed by definitions leads to doctrine and he says somewhere above that “Poetry is bastardized when it becomes permeable to prophecy or to doctrine” and hence it says nothing anymore.As to the void and the flames, one can explain them in religious terms (as you did) which to me are equally interesting as any form of mythology is, or one can assimilate them to a more human level seeing in the flames the isolated soul incapable to connect to the void represented by a society of heartless puppets that can offer no true companionship. Cioran’s infatuation expresses the rage against the human automatons programmed to conquer the surroundings at all costsSloan BashinskyWhat if the entire spiel is about his early infatuation with Hitler, doctrine, his own selling out, and he was not able to bring himself to say it directly, or it is his unconscious confession-projection? There is no way to go where he went and then leave unscathed. Same dynamic joining any cult past or present.EthanNo my friend, no. Some people go down in hell and upon returning they bring back the sword, while others the wounds and the wisdom that grew within those wounds. Read him and judge him only afterwardsSloan BashinskyI read his spiel, it felt off to me, and I wondered what he was about in his own life, and here I am thinking he wrote that about himself. And, yes, it has general application as well.
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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