Blog 19 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

The Last of the Johns in Latvia, called a 'Beggar' in 1929.

The ideological consequences of the Great Schism and the near (never quite) victory of the West over the East.(the East saved the rhetoric of its spiritual teaching, but had to abandon its application in practice), are best captured by the Greek playwright Sophocles (sophist par excellance http://www.iep.utm.edu/sophists/) in his famous tragedy “Oedipus Rex” or Oedipus the King.

The link informs that the early sophists were itinerant teachers, which makes them close kin to, if not necessarily identical with, the itinerant Johns, their Baltic, Slavic, Latin and other wandering brethren.

Itinerancy derives from the sense of freedom that living in the forest, or plain, on the farm brings to young men who are born to it. Even today, I have had the privilege of meeting two such would be wanderers at my countryside home. A young man, of Ukrainian descent, a ne’er-do-well at school and kept behind in his class several times running, visited me looking for work. I know the youth to be of hard working parents and a hard worker himself when with a scythe in hand or in a tractor. Unfortunately—with the destruction of the Latvian countryside culture by the Latvian city folk, and no way of recovering a culture in a demoralized state and deliberately kept that way by a Jesuitical (it never looks the other way) criminal police* headquartered at the regional capital—I could not help the young man. He advised me that once he and a friend had reached the age of eighteen, they would go to England. Since both speak Russian, I ventured to suggest that they travel East instead and try to find a job on the rail line the Chinese plan to built from the Far East to the Far West, or go to the Amur region of Russia, where many Latvian deportees (1949) make their home still.

Sophistry probably has its origin in ancient bards and shamans, who, when threatened by the ecclesiasts of Westernized Christianity in-hire-of-princes, forced them to start writing their oral knowledge in a riddling style, which in the course of time the orthodoxy of court poets and university academicians garbled beyond recognition. The poet Robert Graves, whose poetic muse follows us throughout this series of blogs, mused in his preface to “The White Goddess” that: “…the ancient language [of myth] survived purely enough in the secret Mystery-cults of Eleusis, Corinth, Samothrace and elsewhere and when these were suppressed by the early Christian Emperors, it was still taught in the poetic colleges of Ireland and Wales, and the witch-covens of Western Europe. As a popular religious tradition, it all but flickered out at the close of the seventeenth century….” The date coincides with the time when, too, the remains of Eastern Christianity “flickered out” in Latvia

However, let us return to the poet and playwright Sophocles and his famous tragedy. The secret code used by Sophocles involved substituting the just issued edict (taboo) against self-sacrifice, by camouflaging self-sacrifice inside the preoccupation of Western Christianity (inventor—with the help of the prince-oligarch--of the urban environment and nuclear family) with the incest taboo. The mother, Iocaste, who in the story saves her son Oedipus (Yodi or Yoni) from risking death by exposure to the elements and/or wild beasts, but loses thereby the throne of the King of Thebes for him, attempts to regain the throne through incest. The psychologist Freud, for all his genius, did not see through the sophistication of the Sophoclean riddle—probably because in the secret corners of his mind, he continued to be preoccupied with incest.

The original intent of Sophocles in writing his play was an attempt to preserve the tradition of self-sacrifice as a factor that determined whether a ruling authority http://www.cpjustice.org/node/920 or authorities indeed had the authority to rule.

In our day self-sacrifice is said to have been replaced by reason http://www.sunypress.edu/p-4107-the-social-authority-of-reason.aspx. However, reason has in our time been subject to unrelenting authority (silnaya ruka) of violence reserved for the exclusive use of so-called ‘democratic’ authorities. The presumption of authority by governmental violence is an unethical device to the core, especially when the core of the authority (presidents, ministers, members of senates, etc.) goes unpunished and is free to expect for itself a perpetual future.

*Jesuitical criminal police—in a country as economically hard up as Latvia, the duty of the police is to help guarantee the survival of “the people”, because in the best sense of the word, the police, the gendarmerie, jannisery are of the people.

Blog 4 Midsummer New Year of Johns Eve 2012

Trees Have Eyes

Yesterday, June 4, a sentence in the 2nd paragraph Blog 3), stated that: “Indeed, there is an element of religion in healthy fascism. Fascism [it] uses this religious feeling in creating a communal imagination, while repressing Pop individualism, and not allowing a surreal community.”

For some readers, the statement may seem like an outrage, what with Hitler, Mussolini, Franco not yet a hundred years gone.

Nevertheless, I have held this view for some time, provided that fascism comes sans violence and militarism, which, I believe, has in ancient times was done and accomplished.

I believe that the denial of fascism today is an urban conceit, because fascism (as a dictatorship) in a forest environment is inconceivable, even as a community with close bonds is a natural to it. It is urban conceit (call it unhappiness over the way things are) that gives birth to fascism, even as a democracy (re Parliamentary democracy) becomes a utopian dream. Unfortunately, poets cornered by urban conceits will oppose fascism by supporting extreme individualism as, both, an alternative and a human right.

The charisma that adheres to urban fascism is of course a religious invocation, which is a function of poetry, but, alas! in an environment of vulgar concrete, it will solicit violence to be believed human.

As Robert Graves writes about ‘old style’ poets and their loyalty to the White Goddess [Latvian Laima, goddess of fate, sister of Moonlight, Mēnesnihca]: “’Nowadays’ is a civilization in which the prime emblems of poetry are dishonored. In which serpent, lion and eagle belong to the circus-tent; ox, salmon and boar to the cannery…; and the sacred grove to the saw-mill. In which money will buy almost anything but truth, and almost anyone but the truth-possessed poet.”

Describing his own leanings, Robert Graves continues: “Call me, if you like, the fox who has lost his brush. I am nobody’s servant and have chosen to live on the outskirts of a Majorcan mountain-village, Catholic but anti-ecclesiastical, where life is still ruled by the old agricultural cycle. Without my brush, namely my contacts with urban civilization, all that I write must read perversely and irrelevantly to such of you as are still geared to the industrial machine….”

To such people as Graves identifies, fascism is the alternative to a democracy, which may exist only in a forest, but no longer is, because the forests are deforested.

Perhaps I have diverged from this blog’s main theme, that of Midsummer, New Year of Johns Eve 2012. On the other hand, I have sketched more thoroughly the background against which present-day Latvians enact their Holy day of Johns and why the Holy Day of Johns  ends up in binge drinking.

Under the Opes Skies All Day Long.

Another poet. Sophocles, who when forced to ‘rewrite’ his analysis of our “novus ordo sculorum” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novus_ordo_seclorum , then did indeed rewrite his critique of modern society by stuffing all of his writ into an overly simplistic riddle: “Who at the beginning of his life walks on four, in the middle of his life on two, but at the end of his life on three legs?” The answer: “Man”, however comes nowhere near the playwright’s intent, re http://oedipusrexrewritten.blogspot.com/ , which is to say, the correct answer to the riddle is “man, the masturbator and homosexual”.

Sophocle’s analysis, reaches into the ancient past of Egypt, one of the first places where man established an urban environment and a city. The playwright’s analysis—as I see it--is, briefly, as follows:

When the Queen of Thebes (in Greece) gave birth to a son, Oedipus, her husband, the King of Thebes, Laius, wished to test whether the newborn was believed by the gods fit for the role of future king. This ‘testing’ entailed leaving the infant exposed for one or several nights on the peak of Mt. Citheron. When Queen Iocaste realized what Laius was up to, she revolted. She was not about to risk sacrificing the life of her son—even if the test were to result in the infant’s survival, proof that he is fit to become the next king of Thebes.

When Queen Iocaste learned of the King’s intent, she yelled at the King: “You superstitious urban sob! You really think that the Egyptian god Atum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_creation_myths  created Thebes by masturbating? You think that you are done with me and want to masturbate into being, my son, as your successor?”

Crude as Iocaste’s words may be, it is no less true that virtualism is the consequence of masturbatory activity, and homosexuality is primarily born of the city.