Charon

Charon Forcing Sinner Into His Boat in The Divine Comedy (Gustave Dore)

One day when you're holding back, you realize it's almost over and there's soon going to be nothing that you have to protect yourself from anymore. It can be because either you or they have caught the famous ferry for which there are no roundtrip tickets. You also may find yourself in the predicament of wishing you had told the departed the thing you wanted to say or, having departed yourself, wishing you could tell someone still left back on the river's edge the self-same message Neither Western Union, nor Verizon, nor Google services that area.

July 20, 1944

Graf von Stauffenberg

Hitler's Wehrmacht officers failed in their plot and ended up being hung. However, one wonders it it would have made a difference, if history were fated to be otherwise--and the suitcase with the bomb hadn't been inadvertently moved away from the Fuhrer at the last moment. The July 20, 1944 assassination attempt by Stauffenberg at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia was thwarted, but the attempt to put an end to the Nazi plan (which bears some similarity to Project 2025) went as far back as 1938. One dreams of this or that action changing the course of events, but Hitler couldn't have maintained his power, if he hadn't had the support of the populace, as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen pointed out in Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.

Routine

typewriter scene from The Shining

Routine is the great leveler. Sure you’ve met people who lead seemingly unstructured existences in which they’re buffeted by the winds of chance and fashion. You’ve undoubtedly been told to let go by someone who's critical of your determination. However maturation inevitably creates the need to perform and survive  For instance most jobs go from 9-5. A more precarious freelance existence ultimately requires work. Creativity, goes the old saw, is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration The insouciant type who was the monkey on your back may hide it under a devil-may-care veneer, but most people secretly end up living leading lives of quiet or not so quiet desperation--locked in the prison of what they are.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

 

Sexuality

The subject comes up every few seconds. Have you ever pondered how many people are having sex at any part of the city, at any particular time of the day? And what kind? How many people are taking their clothes off in front of each other first the first time? Oh it’s just the human body? Really? Nudity is downplayed by those who decry objectification? But the fact is instincts are mediated by consciousness. Love is the way consciousness negotiates the shoals of desire. Still the attempt to disinfect sex, to make it antiseptic is Sisyphean with the avalanche of emotion that accompanies the visual and tactile nature of coitus or even just a kiss. Then there’s thought and its police.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

CNN

The recent firing of Scott Pelli and several other well-known staff connected to Sixty Minutes is chilling. Paramount under David Ellison is playing up to Trump to secure the Warner Brothers merger. Add to that the demise of Colbert. The network cited earnings but that was a sorry excuse--the kind that's made when you don't care or simply want to destroy something that's in the way. The creation of a hugely wealthy class of American oligarchs with unregulated power, parallels the rise of Silicon Valley. Larry Ellison founded Oracle. There were robber barons at the end of the l9th Century. Their power was enormous, but the current cabal simply has exponentially more. Will CNN fire Wolf Spitzer or Christiane Amanpour? Will CNN go dark during a strike of employees? Or will there always be someone willing to pass the buck or take the baton. Power comes in all forms. People tell themselves all kinds of things. Undoubtedly there are members of congress who shook hands with the devil under the theory, better them than someone worse. Secretly they would rise up against Satan. The current Big Brother is more nefarious than Orwell's. He can be bought.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Shadow Play

Solipsism is the notion that all of reality is subjective. To Bishop Berkeley,  who said esse est percipi, "to be is to be perceived" nothing would exist without God--keeping the world in his mind's eye. The Matrix was based on the notion of the world as an inner state. Freud envisioned the mind as ego, superego and id, but these were names placed on functions that exist in some reality. In the absence of God, the solipsist finds himself blessedly freed from the notion of consequence. However, can one stand to live with the idea of nothingness? In a famous episode of the Twilight Zone, a condemned man, Dennis Weaver, pleads for his life. If he is executed, he argues, the world will disappear. This episode, "Shadow Play," season #2, episode 26, 1961 is arguably one of the greatest in the history of television. 

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Rush Hour

If you’ve ever journeyed back to the past you’ve noted the “Do Not Disturb” signs. The idea is to leave everything as it was so that the future will fulfill its promise or more specifically exactly the world you, the time traveller, occupied before you left. Is there a divine or supernal touch in this iteration or is it consistent with the philosophy of cosmologists like stephen Hawking whose A Brief History of Time is the Baedeker for those challenging the l86,000 mile per hour speed limit—at which spacetime curves? Everything is as it’s supposed to be or it would be different is a calming spiritual saw that makes it sound like everything is part of god's plan and thus set in a divine kind of stone or marble. However, with the once unthinkable becoming  ever more possible—in a quantum universe--a whole new set of parking regulations and speed limits is needed to accommodate the imminent cosmological traffic jam.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star