Well, I'm not apologizing to you, Ivanka, since you won't have gotten wind of my diss. I'm apologizing to everyone out there accused - as I did you - of being subject to the misguided desires of their father. I am sure it was you and not your Dad who begged that you be altered into better beauty. I'm sure this was an expression of appropriate fatherly love, and that it makes each of you happy in the same way and for the same reason.
Your father stands accused of many things, many publicly known and ugly. Your step-mom, Melania seems bizarrely trapped in modelling pouts, and all these things feel wrapped up in wanting and needing the world's envy. And many apparently do envy the Trump brand, and want to be associated with it and claim the association with the sort of adamancy normally reserved for hatred.
There is apparently some continuum for memory which might be described according to the way that memory is affiliated with emotion. We remember best those events which had some emotional importance to us. We remember least the passing landscapes when our thoughts are directed elsewhere; speaking on the phone while driving, say.
I may be alone in this, but I do wonder what is the cosmic significance of this process. Because I do suppose emotion to be a part of our cosmic substrate, and not associated alone with humanity, say, evolved at the end of a long chain of events.
I suppose that the cosmic pull toward life as opposed to that barren aloneness of the cosmic desert, is emotional, by which I definitionally mean that it is devoid of physical forces. Emotion is defined in the cosmos I inhabit by motions toward or away which are not mediated by the exchange of particles, which is one definition for physical force at the level of subatomics.
Emotion is therefore a function of mind or conceptual reality and not of perceptual or physical reality, but - I continue to maintain - it is not therefore less real.
In this system of beliefs, which forms the bedrock for my living, I am almost precisely as alone as some street-corner barker of crazy certainty which passers by can't be bothered to understand, since it does not relate to anything else which composes their motivations for the day. Ordinary healthy folks keep cosmic thoughts to themselves unless and until they can make sense within some community of discourse, generally as sanctioned by the prestige system of globally sanctioned educational institutions.
I have to apologize to Yale as well, dissed in the same bit of screed up here in the invisiland of interneted exchange. I know that Yale is an important institution, attractor to the best minds from around the globe, who by their concentration can advance the sum of human understanding. (I do still wish they would stop trying to decide who belongs there as students by such a similar process to the one by means of which they select their faculty and researchers).
Prestige and beauty sanction our thoughts and feelings. Beauty is no longer available to me, except perhaps in admiration of my own daughters. My thinking powers recede as well, as I find myself in a kind of long-term battle trench, where God is finally revealed to so many. God the center of the beauty of natural surroundings, the organizer of a life to which mankind is connected rather than apart.
In that I can and do transfer my attention from any one particular face or body, and certainly don't require a face for God, nor gender, nor internalizable mental referent. Not even a name. God without words or name or gender is never hard to conjur.
Most of the mental props to keep God present have lost their utility, constructs as they are of fear and therefore patriarchy. Prisonhouses rather than the liberation wanted for us by the God I know. The woman without her makeup and before the plastic surgery looks ordinary. Once inside, so does Yale, I imagine still, with a few too many callow rich boys, worldy in their peculiarly sheltered ways and therefore destined for power and able to purchase their grades, once purchased for them by leverage from their names.
Cosmically then we are each centers for memory, strange attractors to form a self with name and surrounded by familiars, destined to be remembered for the ages if only we can get to some remarkable conception first. Sometimes it is enough to get to some remarkable place, so long as one is first.
These are functions of memory and truing against a world composed of the memories of others, trued against facts which must leave physical traces to be real. Our memories now are scattered by so much txt each day, no time to be present in the physical world and so no wonder a fellow so central to the textual in-formation of our days need hardly bother with truth. He creates it whole with each tweet. He exists in the shadow where God once lived, and it is naturally our difficulty letting go of that secure structure which gives power to the space, even if occupied by a cartoonish simulacrum of a human. So composed in himself, so utterly narcissistic that he must suppose himself to be God. It is natural that we want to believe in and by words which tweak the structures of our minds in ways reminiscent of wanted certainty.
I am composed of those things I remember, those people, those events, those realizations and sometimes conceptual excitements. I am not so in touch with those that I have loved and who have loved me, and maybe my excuse is that they will always remain present for me. I lie to myself that it is a kindness on my part to keep my face from them, composed as it must be to happiness in the face of raw terror. To Mom, I might as well have been there yesterday, so brief is her memory tracing. I lie to myself that way. It is a comfort only to me.
And those things I do remember are in-formed by the cosmic attractor of love. This is how memory works, this is how our history is shaped, this is how our narratives are formed and collectively rendered up to form our communities and our nations. We the people share a story composed of hopes and dreams and instances from our past when things felt as they should feel, and it is natural to want to share this, and to expand it and to keep out the massing hoards whose shared memories differ and who therefore feel like threats to our future return.
To the victor goes the narrative of victory, and we the people of these United States are surely guilty of putting the face of Donald Trump to the world, because we the people are that narcissistically connected to our own false history for ourselves.
It is hard for me to understand how believers in the actual Jesus can align themselves with patriarchy, with an ingroup fighting out groups, with capitalists winners deployed against anyone having any heart. And so I do pray to the actual Jesus to come back into their hearts, to true them, and to turn their gaze away from barking charlatans and toward that which is the best in each of us, in-formed by love, to stop giving voice to that other motivator of hatred and destruction.
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