Yom Kippur is a holiday of remembrance. Yizkor the first service is often attended by mourners—though by definition everyone is a mourner. "Kaddish," the prayer for the dead is a poem by Allen Ginsberg. The greatest work about memory A La Recherche du Temps Perdu was written by someone whose mother was Jewish. Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is the title of his autobiography. Judaism is not alone. The Tibetan Book of the Dead influenced Gaspar Noe’s Into the Void in which the central consciousness is a dead soul. Dead Souls is the Gogol masterpiece. Then there is the architecture of death the necropolis and the practice of the mortician. Charon takes his passengers on their final voyage across the Lethe—the river of forgetfulness.
Tenacity is a labile quality. It’s invaluable if you're competing in a tournament, but it can easily turn you into a pariah. Social capital is a requirement for exercising what the Japanese call Bunraku or non-quitting spirit. If you are not a desired commodity then you are a pest if you don’t skiddaddle. However like everything there is a graduated cylinder which tells you whether your glass is half full. A stranger who has something to offer may find their perseverance rewarded. Then there is lust, the lingua franca of all social intercourse. Sexual attraction exerts an almost gravitational pull as does charisma. Willfulness is required, but not in the perverse doses that can result in ostracism.
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| WB Yeats |
Anarchism has replaced democracy, but it’s more mental condition than political philosophy, Bovine spongiform encephalopathy is the human form of mad cow. "Unitary Executive Theory" is a prime tenet of Federalism. The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Presidential Immunity. Why? The roots ultimately derive from the notions of monarchy and dynasticism—that Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Hume and Hobbes discountenanced. Hobbes in particular held that human appetite needs to be checked. The violation of the notion of "the emoluments clause" by the current administration is a just one example of unchecked balances.
