Saturday afternoon Labor Day Weekend

A notion

I am a reader. I rarely watch video. Rarer still a movie. I have worked for the American Conservatory Theater and for the San Francisco Opera as a fundraiser and enjoyed my time attending free shows in fine seats as perk for my minimum wage toil but upon the end of those situations and the lingering death of income my recreation is reading. And this has been the case since childhood. I read what interests me indifferent to opinions. Of course my personality is this way as well since my self indulgence in pursuit of my dreams is quite self evident on my resume. Full enjoyment of life and not full employment for the MAN drove me forward. In a lull of employment in Sacramento at 30 I went door to door raising money to clean up irrigation water that had rocket fuel pollution. For some peculiar reason I felt it was important in hot summer to do so paid a minimum wage with two college degrees. The canvass closed but an opportunity was there for doing so in San Francisco so I did.

A college friend was backpacking for 8 weeks on Skye and I sublet his room in the Mission. My next gig I picked up just before he returned and that was fundraising to stop Contra Aid by phone calling into all 50 states 8 hours each day —also for minimum wage.

So in any case here we are and once more without work and destitute there are no survival jobs in Resistance work. So I subsist on air. And to while away the time I read. Not only Substack of course, but books. Books forgotten or unknown that interest me. Books I hope that can teach me. Long ago, 1982, in a bookstore I worked in I picked up Idres Shah “The Way of the Sufi” and one little excerpt remains to this hour. I am sure that even before I read it my active imagination knew it to be true. “A man is just an animal unless he has a guide.”

With this backstory I now come to my new guide. Pavel Florensky, the Russian Da Vinci. A quite remarkable man. Just finishing his book “At the Crossroads of Science and Mysticism” I was suddenly struck by insight. The insight is what I share below.

The absurd in all of this politiking is we are the enemy. It is us. All of us are paying close attention to the theater. We like theater. We like simulation. Once perspective came into play in the Renaissance-based on stagecraft-a representation of the actual arose. The Russian polymath Pavel Florensky writes “Stage decoration is a screen, whereas painting is a window into reality; stage decoration is an imitation of life: man is a prisoner chained to a cliff, to a single place, even to a single point. He is a single eye staring involuntarily at the stage. A living man is replaced by a spectator poisoned by curare which paralyzes the ability to move while leaving the consciousness unaffected. When illusionistic art evolves, when the need arises to create only an appearance of reality, and not a window into it—a means to deceive the immobile viewer emerges: perspective. Perspective does not accord with man’s nature—proof of this is the complex and prolonged labor that was required to hammer out the notion of perspective. The period between the 15th and 18th centuries witnessed a forced retraining of human psycho-physiology. Perspective is alien to man because it is a conspiracy against natural perception: it demands that one see not that which exists but that which is desirable to see." Citing this my point is that all politiking for us is based totally on what is non-existent. No one in politiciks there to SAVE mankind. We know this but repress it. We want to see a hero on the stage. We want the anti-hero to be a hero. In fact this is why we pay close attention to the theater of it all. Trump or RFK, Jr. rah rah our anti-hero hero. Spectators are lost in the Debordian world of Spectacle. As audience we applaud or hiss. Never do we brake away from Spectacle.

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