+++
Today, on 15 May of 2025, we can all smell deep in our nostrils the heavy,
cloying scent of failure on every level.
The right, so-called conservatives, are torching everything they used to bleat
so loudly could only be defended if they were in charge. All the western
tradition, rooted in reason and the rule of law, be it Roman, Hellenic,
Judeo-Christian, or secular transcriptions thereof, they have sent straight to
the garbage heap. Now all they want is to grift money, with dungeons for all
who disagree, and this ethnopolitical absolute squalor they call holiness.
(This new creed is also the exact opposite of what they used to claim to
defend.) US conservatism could hardly be more loudly announcing, to every ear
everywhere, "we failed, the ship is lost, it's every man for himself."
The left has failed at least as badly. With every demographic advantage in the
extreme, they could not let go of their worst prejudices, vanities, and
ignorance -- like the abolition of private property, religion, and government
-- and sustain a working constitutional democratic majority. They never
outgrew the diapers of Marx, the binky of Freud, or the envy of Nietzsche; the
world was theirs to lose, if only they could manage a reality-based path to a
sustainable future, but they couldn't, and they lost it.
Yet of everyone the center has failed worst of all. They won the 20th century
hands-down walking away. And what did they offer as a plan for the 21st?
Nothing. No plan at all. Just leave us alone in our comfortable compartments,
said the center. Don't bother our heads with anything at all. We don't want
to be bobbered.
+
The failure of the right smells worst where its devolution to demagoguery works
best. Conservatism in the US gave up on winning the Western way, that is, by
words, ideas, votes, and results, science and art in harmony with spirituality
and the state, in caritas triangulatum ne plus ultra, for the good of all and
sustainable justice. When they gave up, where they lost their soul, is not
known at this time. But they sold everything to the demagogue who is now
attempting to field a tyranny exactly as Hamilton foretold would happen in the
Federalist 85 if "TIME and EXPERIENCE" (all caps Hamilton's) were rejected.
What failure by these conservatives! What a dogmire shoeshine!
The failure of the left too lingers acridly in every nose. Even now they can
barely tell you what they would recommend. They wanted to tear down every
belief, every value judgment, even truth and definitely science itself, to say
so self-contentedly that "everything is constructed only." They won, and now
cannot believe how defeated they are by such a win. They have gotten rid of
the Enlightenment, with its evil master narratives like voting, laws, facts,
ethics, rights, checks, balances, and norms. They won, and to the demagogue
belong the spoils. The left got rid of truth and beauty, science and art,
right and wrong, borders and boundaries, and who took over? The regressives,
in toto, seized everything.
The center smells to high heaven, stinks actually, like rancid popcorn oil in a
gas station microwave laced with beef broth and processed cheese food spatter.
Their brains seem to have disappeared completely while leaving all their
behaviorisms intact. Rather than doing the honorable, practical work to build
a coalition that moves together for cooperative sustainability, leaving the
failure-fringes of both left and right to their rank MFN delusions, the US
middle transformed into a blob of inertia unable to make a single peep against
either the failure-right or the failure-left. Far from vital, rather moribund,
today's failure-center has lost the noble art of saying "hello right, from you
we take A and B worth conserving, and from you left, we take viable reforms C
and D; we'll pass on right extremism E and left fabulism F." If the center is
the heart of every living polity, the US heart today has a whistling, gaping
hole in it. The blood, as it were, of breath and body, word an
d deed, thought and action, nutrient and transport, through which every
society ultimately lives or dies, sits mildewing in the veins and constipating
in the arteries. "A republic, if you can keep it"? More like potato-chip
grease caked on a smart phone to fill in the screen-cracks while swiping left
on citizen intellection and right on last year's beach read for overeducated
insomniacs.
+
With such failures by US society in every quarter, it is all but guaranteed the
entire natural world will die next. Birds, fish, plants, fauna, lichens,
everything gone, all decimated and ruined, irreplaceable; as Leonardo wrote,
"things of the very highest price, without leave from the Master of it; while
it never was theirs nor in their power," will be sold and ruined for greed and
mindless plunder in monstrous fashion, and "their bodies will become the
sepulchre and means of transit of all they have killed." All for superfluous
food and raiment, excessively disposable and utterly without the absolution of
need, the divine web of life on earth some four billion years in the making
shall be flushed like excrement from the book of all things, never to return,
no, not ever.
Little wonder then should we have, when the demagogue riles its slavish crowds,
extolling the worst of all worlds, and former conservatives of conscience
cringe, die a little on the inside, buy bunkers, and wish it all would end as
soon as possible. No less unsurprisingly the left cannot believe how
completely degraded by its glorious success the world it claimed to be saving
has been. They invoked as inevitable the demagogue in obsequious prayer for
generations, two if not three, and now it having arrived they weep
inconsolably. The center, which always promised not to be able to think for
itself, has kept its noble pledge and tut-tuts how the brain trusts port and
starboard have so cruelly disappointed their expertise at measuring six of one
and half a dozen of the other. The towering colossus of progress and principle
-- these United States of America, at least for now -- buckling at the
philosophical and ethical knees, the whole rest of the wide world scatters,
chittering, li
ke palmetto beetles during an earthquake, hiding from truth, memory, and
conscience like nocturnal insects from sunlight.
Science and art are of course being destroyed as first priority. How can
machines govern the failure phase, the rot and abandonment of everything, if
science and art are still happening and asking questions and proposing
alternatives? No failure-machine could tolerate art and science, experience
and experiment, to obstruct the algorithm. And what is the algorithm? To
allocate the owner of the instrument a seat on a lifeboat. How noble a
calling, how elevated, and majestic! To be first in line to abandon ship and
to kick every drowning child and elder face down into a wave of suffocating
aquamarine. Hurrah, hip hip, hail, hallelujah! "Heroes Trample Hungry Infants
in Pell-Mell Retreat," reads the century's headline and very likely the
millennium's.
+
Unless -- unless what? Well, not to mince words, unless success can seize the
remains of the day from the jaws of failure. The best of the right, the left,
and the center, that is, must find their sustainable honor, unite, and follow
it, and jettison the demagogue, and the cruelty, the fabulism, the vanity, the
dishonor, and make a sustainable world.
Of course this "success" being spoken of, you say, is impossible. Marx, or
Freud, or Nietzsche, or somebody, said so; Machiavelli, or Smith, or Hobbes, or
whoever. And who are you, you who pay your mortgage and your grocery bill with
money earned from praising Nietzsche, and Freud, and Marx, Machiavelli or
Smith, or Harrington, to say otherwise? Your job and very raison d'etre, the
reason your spouse and children tolerate you (love's perhaps too far a bridge
alas), is to prove every day the impossibility of anything succeeding ever, at
all, selah, shantih shantih shantih. Your words have become like air bubbles,
but you will not have it said that way out loud.
Luckily some words, ideas, images, and meanings are still among us. These, if
used well, can salvage first politics, then economics, then society, then
culture; and once those great victories are won the healing of nature, the
non-human world, the climate, and microplastic sweep-up can commence at
blockbuster scale. But how? How now? Right left and center, in the US and
Europe, Asia and America, from north to south and east to west, all have
failed, failed abjectly, and their promise sits rotting at the wharf, their
sailors picking their scabs and nits and blistering in the sun.
+
Well, let us give thanks. There was one among us, maybe just one, but one is
all we need, thank blue blistering barnacles. His name was Leonardo, and he
knew one thing united all the warring ignorant armies clashing by night,
regardless of creed color or catechism: Experience, experiment, esperienza.
You can call it consciousness, or you can call it history -- it has a past, a
present, and a future yes indeed -- but both sides of every hatred, injustice,
war, and oppression have it. All of us are, truly, its children, and
collectively we are, literally, its child. It created us as surely as the
chicken pot pie we ate Halloween night at age seven built our brain cells and
neural network, and our mother's milk cemented in our fontanelle.
Since every army's soldiers, generals, colonels, and commissars have
Experience, and were created by it, and remain open inextricably to it every
passing instant, as completely as they need their next breath, it can govern
them, Experience can. It is greater than they are, than each of us is. And
it's not just armies experience can conquer. Specializations, like science and
religion, competitive guilds or fleets of cobbler's privilege that they amount
to, also fall to its mighty presence. Spirituality, of both the highly
doctrinal kind and sorts less so, must bow to its majestic continuity.
Science, technology, engineering, and information are unfit to kiss its hem
without first earning its blessing. Yes, experience rules over both church and
state (just ask the Sufi, and David Hume, Tibetan medicine, and the Navajo).
Old and young? Both equally revere experience as their one true maestra. Rich
and poor? Experience and experiment are the true leveler, the supreme voice of
w
orth and status. East and west, new and old, city and country, oppressed and
oppressor alike, Esperienza is their true maestra. Aesthetic, scientific, and
politic, and of all else in life it is the way, path, door, and domicile.
Leonardo knew this and designed accordingly.
For after all, Esperienza is nothing more than the fabric of conscience, of
knowledge itself, and agency in every form made flesh by the action of memory
through time upon cell structure, process, interaction, and repetition. It is
nothing more and nothing less than the soul, mind, and volition of the planet,
the network set of all such. We did not create it, nor can we destroy it
without eliminating the planet itself and thereby damning ourselves to eternal
ignominy. Can we be human enough to look experience, our own at the very
least, in the mirror, make our peace and confess our wrongs, pledge to do
better, speak nobly with integrity, and work daily to save the tissue of this
blue-green haunted orb?
Of course we can. And since we can, we must; there is no other vector.
+
To read the words of the messenger, the one who got it right, on this theme of
Esperienza just go read wikiquote for Leonardo of Vinci. Use control-F to read
what he said about Experience and experiment, and the "cruelty of man," and "of
selling paradise." Realize then, or at least discuss with friends, the
hypothesis never before proposed till 2019 of how Esperienza is to Leonardo as
Calumny is to Apelles, how the portrait of the smiling lady on a balcony is
your own mirror, parent, maestra, conscience, guide, and benefactor, its bridge
the flow of built history and its garment the inhabited present of same.
Observe how every culture has this image available to it today as well as the
word to go with it. Meditate on this, absorb it, be present. This is how we
can succeed, all of us, literally every human alive today, and therefore how we
must.
As I happen to be reading Sun Ra these days, a person not without flaws
perhaps, but who lived the life of the imagination as best he could on many
occasions, consider his poem from 1980 about choice itself.
And read it, as you must, while viewing the portrait of Esperienza side by side.
"You Must Choose" (1980)
A widening of concepts is necessary
Another look at the future is required.
Look and see the twin road vision light
It is darker than the night.......
It is the twin-road heraldry
..................... Vibrations of a different kind......
These kind vibrations are just the kind we need......
The distance narrows
We are approaching the twin roads of the future........
One day the planet earth must choose to change
..............Yes.................
There is no other way.
Don't forget the alter hints I give to you.......
The day is soon that you must choose to change.....
Be sure your intuitions voice is not denied
Or perhaps unintentionally defied.......
No other voice will speak to you
There is nothing left for any other voice to say.
+++
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