Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Feminists Earn a Dollar for Each Hour of Eternity Squandered

I forget where I saw it -- probably at Happy Acres -- and exactly what it said, but something to the effect that there are people who long for eternity but don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Saturday afternoon.

This implies that our fitness for eternity, like anything else, is a kind of skill. It is part of what it means to be a spiritual pathlete.

So, while looking back at the Top Ten Ways to Mess Up Your Child, the following caught my eye; it is from a 1917 eighth grade literature reader for California public schools, before John Dewey ruined everybody's lives and ate all our steak:

"Literature prepares [the student] for the hours of leisure now and later." It "makes the pupil a good companion for himself, and removes the appeal of cheap entertainments and unworthy companions."

No cheap entertainment and tawdry companions? That's cultural genocide. Against the left.

So, we need preparation for leisure, or training in Slack. This is something I have always recognized, nor is it something that escaped God's gnosis, otherwise why go to the trouble of spelling it out in Genesis 2, in which we are advised to imitate God by doing nothing for roughly 1/7 of the time.

If we apportion it to the week -- which is my preference -- instead taking it all at once, it translates to 3.4285714 hours of slacktivity per day. That sounds about right. (Note that my blogging is always from the slackspace, for which reason it is utterly without practical purpose.)

Remember, when we are in slack, we are not doing nothing, but rather, doing nothing, and this makes all the difference. A merely lazy man is not a properly enslackened man.

Esolen touches on this on p, 66, noting that there are people who "can be lazy, but they can never be at ease." The laziness is an escape, not an inscape. Thus, they are nagged by the conscience, unless they succeed in numbing it altogether, like Lamar Odom.

Now, the conscience can also be a nag when one is being properly slackful, and that's a problem. It's like a spiritual autoimmune disorder, in which the conscience cannot distinguish between the one and the other -- passive laziness and active slack -- and persecutes both with equal relish. Sometimes you must tell your conscience in no uncertain terms that you are under the Mandate of Heaven, so lay off.

Note that under the prelapsarian conditions of Eden, we presumably lived in primordial slack. I don't want to get into a fruitless he-said, she-said, God-said rehash, but suffice it to say that when the dust settled, man exchanged slack for work. Were our primordial ancestors idiots?

No more idiotic than our current crop of ovary tower feminists. The chapter we're discussing starts out with a crack by Chesterton about women who declared "that they would no longer be dictated to, and promptly became stenographers."

Ho! Reminds me of women who, when they get married, resist the patriarchy by keeping their father's surname.

If we consider the structure of Genesis, we see that Eve is susceptible to the lower promptings symbolized by the serpent, and that she pulls Adam down with her, since his weakness -- like all men -- is for Woman.

This is not to blame Eve per se, since she simply exposes Adam's own weakness. Adam faces in two directions, toward heaven and earth, and he simply defaults to the latter instead of maintaining the proper complementarity.

Using the dodgy technique of inverse analogy, the whole story implies that Woman is a kind of terrestrial axis who mirrors the metacosmic God-axis. And a moment's thought confirms that this must be the case, because there is no doubt whatsoever that when we enter the world as neurologically premature infants, our Whole World revolves around Woman, AKA M(o)ther.

But the role of mother is to eventually hand the child over to Father, i.e., the Heavenly Father (of whom the earthly father is a deputized agent).

Speaking of inverse analogies, consider how Mary is the recapitulation of Eve, only Getting it Right this Time. Whether looked at literally, symbolically, or realsymbolically, Eve, instead of taking her cue from below, takes it from above, which only turns the human cosmos back right-side up.

Once again, Mother is the axis, for without her Yes, we would all still be wandering in the bewilderness of the cosmic No!

Radical feminists proudly recapitulate the fall by screeching NO! at the top of their lungs. Here is how Esolen describes the postmodern version of the fall: "women who are indispensable as culture makers in the home" give this up in favor of becoming "dispensable and interchangeable in the workplace, and indeed subordinate..."

This must be one of the greatest cons in history -- bearing in mind that the Fall itself takes place outside history, or in trans-history. So it's really the same serpent and the same con.

And men are still to blame for allowing it to happen. Adam could always have said NO to Eve and YES to God. But modern man is so severely PCwhipped that he is too weak to resist.

Throughout this silly charade, the feminist will insist that she is acting in the name of "freedom." Which is a laugh. "In other words, you are free if you must show up at a certain place at a certain time, to do a certain well-defined and usually narrow thing for a certain salary, or else be fired." Congratulations, "you are free if you push papers for a boss nine hours a day or scrape the plaque from the teeth of strangers with bad breath" (ibid.).

Feminists love to flaunt their entirely bogus statistic of earning 71 cents on the male dollar, or whatever it is. They are clueless to the fact that for each dollar earned on a trivial job, they are exchanging something absolutely priceless. Speaking from personal vicarious experience, I know my wife would say that no amount of money would be worth what she has received from ten-plus years of motherhood. Even considering the proposition is absurd. She told the serpent to fuck off.

Yes, there is labor. But its end is leisure. We do something in order to celebrate nothing. For what is the point of a celebration? It is not a distraction, but rather, the opposite. I want to say deus-attraction, but that's a stupid way to end a post.

15 comments:

mushroom said...

PCwhipped

That is so beautiful.

mushroom said...

Yes, the guilt of slack is something with which I struggle, and it probably is one of the great attractions of drugs. I have to remind myself of Pascal's dictum: All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Alone with a book is good. Alone with one of those damn phones is not.

Gagdad Bob said...

I have resumed meditation lately. Actually it's a combination meditation/prayer. It's a modified version of the technique taught by the genius/kook Roy Masters, in which you look through the forehead with eyes closed and focus on the sensations of the right hand. It occurred to me that this must lock down the left brain (which controls the right hand) and free up the right, which is the lens of eternity...

mushroom said...

I remember Masters. He was a strange combination. I might try that.

Gagdad Bob said...

Here's a short guided meditation.

julie said...

I'll second Mushroom's first.

Interesting about the meditation. We try to do the Rosary most days; I find it keeps the hands and mouth busy, and frees up the mind for meditation.

I don't want to get into a fruitless he-said, she-said, God-said rehash, but suffice it to say that when the dust settled, man exchanged slack for work. Were our primordial ancestors idiots?

This is also a great way to describe the transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer. Or rather, the historical transition describes what happened when we left the Garden. Initially, as I understand it, they went from having a life of relative leisure to a life of grinding difficulty, frequent famine, and an earlier death. Farming is hard work, especially when you don't really know what you're doing. Why did they stick with it? I guess because they couldn't go back, what with the flaming sword and all...

Gagdad Bob said...

Yes, hunter-gatherers had a great deal of slack. But it must have been rather tedious, with no developed culture...

julie said...

Almost certainly. Being human, though, I'm sure they manufactured plenty of drama to fill the boredom. Nothing like nursing a feud from your grandparents' days to while the hours away.

julie said...

Way off topic, I have discovered the last couple of months that the boy's medicine is actually cheaper using no insurance than it was when we had "good" insurance through my husband's work. The listed price is higher, but Walgreen's offers a discount for those who aren't covered. I wonder how many people would be paying less month to month without the "help" of their prescription plans?

mushroom said...

Cool.

julie said...

Re. the meditation, interesting technique. Thanks. I can see how it would be helpful to combine that with prayer.

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

Yes, that meditation video is already helpful for me. It never occured to me that the left brain could be shut down in this manner, thus freeing the right brain.

Tony said...

Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture

I guess that would make us "pieps"

Van Harvey said...

Magister said "Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture"

Yo, my pieps! Love that book.

ted said...

You know Bob, I just had an insight about what you said about paying attention to the right hand (and shutting down the left brain). Da Free John, albeit as crazy as he was, also had some spiritual brilliance in his writings. He would talk about the Amrita Nadi as the cave in the heart and that it actually had a seeming location in the body that was "two finger-widths to the right of heart center." Just an interesting correlation.

In regards to Roy Masters, he is one of the only mindfulness teachers out there that sees through the fallacy of left thinking. Every other mindfulness teacher elevates it as a higher emergent worldview in consciousness.

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