New Yorker article. Remnant article.
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Hildegard of Bingen
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some Suicides
First a positive note: A Dylan biopic is coming, A Complete Unknown.
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Del Shannon (Charles Weedon Westover), December 30, 1934 – February 8, 1990, known prmarily for his Billboard Hot 100 #1 hit, Runaway, 1961. "Suffering from depression, Shannon committed suicide on February 8, 1990, with a .22-caliber rifle at his home in Santa Clarita, California, while on a prescription dose of the anti-depressant drug Prozac. Following his death, The Traveling Wilburys honored him by recording a version of "Runaway"." (Wikipedia)
Dalida, O Sole Mio. I think I'm in love. "Dalida (17 January 1933 – 3 May 1987), birth name Iolanda Cristina Gigliotti, was a singer and actress who performed and recorded in more than 10 languages including: French, Arabic, Italian, Greek, German, English, Japanese, Hebrew, Dutch and Spanish." [. . .]On Saturday, 2 May 1987, Dalida committed suicide by overdosing on barbiturates.[7][8] She left behind a note which read, "La vie m'est insupportable… Pardonnez-moi." ("Life has become unbearable for me… Forgive me.")" (Wikipedia)
The Singing Nun, Dominique, 1963. "Jeanine Deckers (17 October 1933 – 29 March 1985) was a Belgian singer-songwriter and initially a member of the Dominican Order in Belgium (as Sister Luc Gabrielle). She acquired world fame in 1963 as Sœur Sourire (Sister Smile) when she scored a hit with the her French-language song "Dominique". She is sometimes credited as "The Singing Nun". [. . .]
Citing their financial difficulties in a note, she and her companion of ten years[8][9][10], Annie Pécher, both committed suicide by an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol on 29 March 1985.[11][12] In their suicide note, Decker and Pécher stated they had not given up their faith and wished to be buried together after a church funeral.[7] They were buried together in Cheremont Cemetery in Wavre, Walloon Brabant, the town where they died.[13] The inscription on their tombstone reads "I saw her soul fly across the clouds", a line from Deckers' song "Sister Smile is dead". (Wikipedia)
Phil Ochs, Small Circle of Friends. There but for Fortune. "Philip David Ochs (/ˈoʊks/; December 19, 1940 – April 9, 1976) was an American protest singer (or, as he preferred, a topical singer) and songwriter who was known for his sharp wit, sardonic humor, earnest humanism, political activism, insightful and alliterative lyrics, and distinctive voice. He wrote hundreds of songs in the 1960s and released eight albums in his lifetime." [. . .] "On April 9, 1976, Ochs hanged himself.[110]" (Wikipedia)
My favorite suicide song is Shiver Me Timbers by Tom Waits. James Taylor offers a beautiful interpretation. Is it really about suicide at sea? The reference to Martin Eden suggests to me that it is. But you might reasonably disagree.
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Politics
Representative Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) tears former Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle to shreds. Mace has the political cojones that Milque Toast Mitt and his sickening RINO ilk lack.
"That's bullshit." (1:22) Why be civil to the anti-civilizational?
Sage advice from a former Speaker: don't underestimate Kamala.
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On Death: Subjective and Objective Views
Substack latest.
Is death an evil?
14 responses to “On Death: Subjective and Objective Views”
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The Bloodbath Canard
The corpulent Democrat Jerry Nadler repeated it today before the Christopher Wray congressional hearing. The context-dropping crapweasel knows full well what Trump meant, and if you don't, Snopes will clue you in.
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Am I an Intellectual Glutton? Evdokimov, Jackson, Precepts, and Counsels
Study everything! proclaims the first half of my masthead motto. I live by it. Am I an intellectual glutton? The self-critical and conflicted Tom Merton asked himself that very question in a journal entry. I put the question to myself.
Example. I am up from a nap and enjoying an iced coffee. I will soon be banging on all eight. As part of the afternoon start-up I am reading back-to-back, and back-and-forth, Paul Evdokimov (The Sacrament of Love: The Nuptial Mystery in the Orthodox Tradition, St. Vladimir's Press, 1985, orig. published in 1980 as Sacrement de L'Amour), and the Blake Bailey biography of Charles Jackson, the alcoholic, married-to-woman, homosexual who achieved minor literary fame as the author of the thinly-veiled autobiographical booze novel, The Lost Weekend (1944). Jackson died at age 65 having destroyed himself with drugs and alcohol.
I have long been fascinated by the utterly wild diversity of human types. There is nothing like it it the animal world, and yet we too are animals. We are in continuity with the animals but an incomprehensible rupture, saltation, jump, metabasis eis allo genos, occurred at some point in the evolutionary process that gave rise to man who is, paradoxically, both an animal and not an animal. Heidegger is right; there is an abysmal/abyssal (abgruendig) difference between man and animal. An abyss yawns between the two. Heidegger is echoing Genesis but going deeper, and some would say, off the deep end, with his talk of man as Dasein, the Da of Sein/Seyn. More on Heidegger when I dig into Dugin.
And then there is Paul Evdokimov (1901-1970). I have Merton to thank for bringing him to my attention. Here is a passage that struck me:
There is no reason . . . to call one path [the marital state] or the other [the monastic state] the preeminent Christianity, since what is valid for all of Christendom is thereby valid for each of the two states. The East [unlike the RCC] has never made the distinction between the "precepts" and the "evangelical counsels." The Gospel in its totality is addressed to each person; everyone in his own situation is called to the absolute of the Gospel. Trying to prove the superiority of the one state over the other is therefore useless . . . The renunciation at work in both cases is as good as the positive content that the human being brings to it: the intensity of the love of God. (Evdokimov, p. 65)
For the Roman Catholic distinction between precepts and counsels of perfection that Evdokimov is rejecting, see here. "It has been denied by heretics in all ages, and especially by many Protestants in the sixteenth and following centuries . . . "
One response to “Am I an Intellectual Glutton? Evdokimov, Jackson, Precepts, and Counsels”
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Institutions
Institutions too often value their own perpetuation over the fulfillment of their legitimate mandates. Examples are legion.
(This aphorism inspired by Chip Roy's grilling of the prevaricating FBI director Christopher Wray.)
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Self-Admonition: Do Your Best!
Do the best you can for as long as you can with your life's allotment of materials, tools, and talents. The best you can do won't be the best, but your best, the personal best, unique to you, unrepeatable, and incommunicable to any other. Your uniqueness distinguishes your best from the bests of all the rest. Tread the path of self-individuation and become the unique individual only you can become — or fail to become out of slackery and inanition.
Look up to your superiors in the hierarchies of achievement and endowment. You are not their equal and you never, or only rarely, will be. If you can move up a rung or two, do so. Emulate where that is possible. But don't confuse emulation with imitation: the former includes but is more than the latter. Look up, but without envy. Their lot and their allotment is not yours. They will be held to a higher standard, and judged the more harshly the more they have buried their talents. Their boons are burdens, their blessings bonds. And so are yours to a lesser measure. Much will be demanded from those to whom much has been given. Your task is yours alone: to work the materials of your allotment with your tools and talents in your time and place the best you can for as long as you can.
If comparison breeds envy, drop comparison. To feel diminished by another's success or well-being either is, or is the near occasion of, a deadly sin. Be your incomparable self. There is and can be only one of you just as there is and can be only one One by which all beings are beings.
If admiration of the other sires denigration of self, drop admiration.
The strenuous life is best by test. We are here to battle the hebetude of the flesh and the sluggishness of the mind.
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The New Politics: A Battle of Billionaires
Some cynics (Moldbug?) will say that it has always been like that: the essence of the political is captured in the Golden Rule: Those with the gold, rule. If that is so, let the battle proceed. I am glad we have Trump and Musk on our side.
You don't defeat transgender Unsinn with calm arguments and appeals to reason, but by Musk-et.
One response to “The New Politics: A Battle of Billionaires”
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Contemplating Suicide?
Look before you make the leap of faith in ultimate nonentity. There may be no exit.
Top o' the Stack.
Girlfriend dumped you? Give it six months, and you may wonder what you ever saw in her.
The Stoic method of division may help you over the hump, the slump, the slough of despond.
8 responses to “Contemplating Suicide?”
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RINOs are Worse than Democrats!
Thus spake Leo Terrell on Mark Levin's show on Saturday night. True. Here's my two cents.
Trump's unification of the Republication Party must include the purging of the RINOs. Start with Loony Liz and Milquetoast Mitt.
Not so long ago the 'circular firing squad' was an apt metaphor for the behavior of Republicans among themselves, and 'circling the wagons' among the Democrats. Now it's the other way around. The times they are a'changin.'
And so I permit myself a descent into Schadenfreude as the Dems implode. The fools are doing it to themselves. May they bring their folly to fruition.
6 responses to “RINOs are Worse than Democrats!”
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Mortalism
Does the soul die with the body?
Top o' the Stack.
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Songs of Freedom and Liberty
Metallica, Don't Tread on Me
Rascals, People Got to Be Free
Tom Petty, I Won't Back Down
Johnny Cash, I Won't Back Down
Merle Haggard, The Fightin' Side of Me
The Who, Going Mobile
Richie Havens, Freedom
Cream, I Feel Free
The Band, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
Arlo Guthrie, City of New Orleans
Highwaymen, City of New Orleans
6 responses to “Saturday Night at the Oldies: Songs of Freedom and Liberty”
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A Quote of Note from J. D. Vance’s RNC Speech
Here is the part of Vance's speech Thursday night that impressed me the most. It also impressed Cathy Young at The Bulwark, but for opposite reasons. It sounds Blut-und-Boden to her: "I think it’s fair to say that this portion of Vance’s speech had overtones of blood-and-soil nationalism." Fair? Or scurrilous?
You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea. And to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas, like the rule of law and religious liberty. Things written into the fabric of our Constitution and our nation. But America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.
Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms. [I would add: ONLY on our terms.] That’s the way we preserve the continuity of this project from 250 years past to hopefully 250 years in the future.
Now in that cemetery, there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.
Now that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principle[s]. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home. And if this movement of ours is going to succeed, and if this country is going to thrive, our leaders have to remember that America is a nation, and its citizens deserve leaders who put its interests first. (Emphasis added.)
Perhaps I will explain myself tomorrow if Typepad behaves itself.
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OK. It is now 'tomorrow.' (Memo to self: write a post on the use and abuse of temporal indexicals.)
There is a distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism. The former is rooted in blood and soil, language and tradition, the particular. The latter is based on ideas and propositions that purport to be of universal validity. American nationalism is not wholly civic. Indeed, it is hard to imagine any nation that could be wholly civic, wholly 'propositional' or wholly based on a set of beliefs and values. And yet the United States is a proposition nation: the propositions are in the founding documents. This cannot be reasonably denied. You should now pull out your copy of the Declaration of Independence and carefully re-read its second paragraph. There are plenty of propositions, presuppositions, principles and values there for you to feast your mind on.
I also don't see how it could be reasonably denied that the discovery and articulation and preservation of classically American principles and values was achieved by people belonging to a certain tradition grounded proximally in our founding documents and ultimately in our Judeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman heritage.
This has consequences for immigration policy. I take it to be axiomatic that immigration must be to the benefit of the host country, a benefit not to be defined in merely economic terms. I also take it to be axiomatic that there is no right to immigrate any more than anyone has a right to invade one's domicile and set up camp there. This is why immigrants must be vetted and why the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants must be upheld, along with the related distinction between citizens and non-citizens. Only those who accept our principles, values, and the like should be let in.
Although we are, collectively, in steep cultural decline, normative American culture is superior to plenty of other cultures I could mention. If you don't believe that, you are free to leave. Just as there is no right to immigrate, there is no obligation to stay. So there is a sense in which I am for open borders: they ought be be open in the outbound direction. This is why it is perfectly asinine to liken a southern border wall to the Berlin Wall as more than one prominent Democrat has done. It is entirely fitting that the totemic animal for this once-respectable party is the jackass. 'Asinine' from L. asinus = ass. The word is polyvalent, a fact I will exploit in a moment.
We have a culture to restore and defend. There is only one man who is in a position to lead us forward. You know who he is. So get off your sorry ass and join the fight.
As for Cathy Young, she is doing what hate-America leftist scum regularly do: she is playing the Nazi card, a card they never leave home without.
15 responses to “A Quote of Note from J. D. Vance’s RNC Speech”
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Near-Death Experiences
Do they prove anything? The case of Richard Neuhaus.
Substack latest.
3 responses to “Near-Death Experiences”
2 responses to “Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some Suicides”