Money is too important to leave to bankers

Look at this link: http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=13241. It is IMHO the truth about dear Pres. Obama. Whether from stupidity or malice I do not know, but he has apparently given his blessing to what the author of this link considers the biggest swindle in known world history: the current wretched breakdown of Wall St.'s banking "thing" and government "bailout" of it. Hard to know how this is going to work out,  but nobody is showing any interest in the only solution that has any hope. This is the principle that will clarify everything, but when will we hear it from presidential lips? The principle is that true national sovereignty and the issuance of money require each other. Private banks now issue our (U.S.) money; THEREFORE private banks are sovereign in the U.S. With the known results: wreckage, take-over, onrushing poverty, serfdom, etc. Maybe that's what the bankers really want; in any case it is what we are going to get unless we take the public credit back for the public and let the banks do banking for profit. But NOT ISSUE OUR MONEY and lend it back to us at compound interest that can never be repaid 

Notes on the Pygmalion Process

By Tom White

What is a gripping story, a good yarn? If you go to writers' conferences (I've been to a few), you find this question discussed and re-discussed ad infinitum; and properly so, because if you are a fiction writer and can't make a "good yarn," you are soon going to have to give up writing yarns and become a United Parcel Service driver.

But I think a lot of the writing and discussing about "story" is superficial. People talk about action and plot and character and diction and all that. Use short, vigorous sentences, they say, and use adjectives infrequently. Emphasize lively verbs. Start with a bang, make your people believable, establish point of view, know what your theme is, write about what you know, structure a tight plot (that's a tough one), and so on.

But the funny thing is, you can do all those things brilliantly and still end up with a kind of flat product. You might even sell a lot of copies of your flat product if you hit a combination of theme, setting, and character that is à la mode at the moment; but after a while it becomes evident that flat is flat, and your work disappears from view.

I am not going to commit the sin of mixing up market response with critical evaluation. The hell with the market. If a story is good, and doesn't sell, it's still good. If a story is good, and sells, it's still good. In some circles popularity is the kiss of critical death, but that's as unfair on one side as judgment strictly on sales is on the other.

I don't think a definition of a good story will come in the abstract. Think of examples. Henry James's The Bostonians, which I happen to have just read, is a good story. (Never could be a mass-market best-seller but it is by no means unknown or unregarded. It is, in fact, masterwork.)

My all-time favorite "delightful story" is The Tempest. Leaving aside more or less grudging reading by students, I doubt that it is taking the contemporary reading public by storm.

As I write this I have been reading Louis L'Amour's 1957 story, Last Stand at Papago Wells. Like all of L'Amour's stuff, this was (is) immensely popular. I think every book he has written has sold at least a million copies. (L'Amour, unlamented in the academies, is celebrated by millions of his readers, whose will to live the good life he so generously nourished.)

Well, for sure I’ve named three quite disparate works. They are all, in my view, great stories, but I think it would be hard to draw any valid general rule for plot, character, setting, theme, diction, etc., that would fit them all.

What I think they all three display is genius, and now we are at last getting close to the point I want to make. "Genius" means spirit. As has often been pointed out, we really should not say that Shakespeare is a genius, but that Shakespeare has a genius, or has genius; that is, at the top of his form, he is filled with the Spirit that creates, and, you will recall, also bloweth where it listeth.

The Spirit doesn't always pick master poets who have steeped themselves in the esotericism of their times. It can pick a great-domed patrician, elegant artist, and student of society like Henry James, or it can settle on a fanatically hard-working fiction hack like Louis L'Amour, just as it once did on another extraordinary fiction factory named Honoré de Balzac.

The sign of Genius (let me capitalize it from here on) is that "the story" rises above all the mechanics of its production. You see a Pygmalion process at work. The writer puts up a scaffold to work on the stone, he chips and hammers and blasts and whacks. When he gets all done and takes down the scaffolding, the statue steps down and has tea with him. The work is alive. It's more than the sum of all the labors of the writer-sculptor. "Genius" has entered. The Spirit has moved upon the waters.

Having got this far, I'm almost unwilling to go any further. But I am now going to propose a way of looking at a story (not new with me, to be sure) that I think helps us to recognize that, indeed, Genius has been with us. A certain kind of trace has been left. A kind of track of the cat. It won't do a writer much good (I presently think) to try to write, as to a formula, on the basis of what follows; but it might serve to point him or her toward the existentialist cum theological cum psychological work on his or her own being that he or she needs to do to become the sort of person Genius might choose to light upon.

That reminds me to say, strictly by the way, that the one thing I am absolutely sure Genius likes in a writer is the habit of much writing, combined with as much self-editing as the writer can bring himself to do. And the self-editing is way behind the much-writing in Genius-priority, although not in pedant-priority.

The sure marks of Genius in a story? There is a struggle which has meaning. That is, it matters whether good or evil comes out on top. In a good story, one marked by Genius, good always wins, but not by accident, easily, or as a result of luck. Good wins—because good wins. A true story, that is, a "good yarn," must reflect the reality of the universe. In this universe the good—some call it God—will, must prevail. All Revelations promise that. But I believe you could come to the same assurance logically, if you had reasoning power enough. Or you can do what I do: take it "on faith," accept Christ's teaching: "I have overcome the world."

I do not wish to argue religion here, I only mean to suggest that story insists on a "good" ending. Not necessarily a happy one, but a good one, in which it is plain that people who win in life stick to the ancient and honorable virtues and, above all, exhibit courage. Dr. Johnson said courage was the most important virtue because without it you could not practice any of the others.

Anti-story, of which we have had a lot in this century, tends to make the points that courage is fatuous, evil prevails, and in any case life is meaningless beyond whatever sense-based satisfactions, i.e. "pleasures," you can get as you go along. As a culture we have come a long way from holding it as axiomatic, for example, that a young man's life is well spent in defense of his country. In other words, that his life has had meaning; that, in the story that was the life of a soldier now dead in battle, the outcome was good. (I do not speak here of the persons who may have mislead his country into war.)

Anti-story is sans Genius by definition. That is, I think, the case with such a monumental production as Joyce's Ulysses, not to speak of his Finnegan's Wake. Ulysses is a book that succeeds marvelously as sociology (Pound said something to the effect that it was brilliant diagnosis of the sickness of the nineteenth century), but it is a fierce bust as story. Ulysses sold early on because it was mildly pornographic, before we had become inured to hard-core. It must sell now chiefly to college students, who undoubtedly are as bored with Joyce as they ever were, or still are, with the archaic locutions of Shakespeare.

Tolkien, on the other hand, whom Edmund Wilson ridiculed, confident that such antic, medievalist nonsense as The Hobbit and the Ring Trilogy could hardly succeed in our wise times, wrote wonderful stores, stories-with-the-rim-off. "Do you think Toller's [Tolkien's] things will sell?" his sophisticated Oxford friends asked, knowing that in the post-Joyce age they certainly shouldn't. But look what happened.

So Genius will always see to it that good story ends with the victory of the good, because that is how matter mirrors spirit, must mirror spirit to be faithful to the ontological fact. Genius always knows this, no matter what any mere writer thinks.

Genius knows a few other things about making stories that ordinary well-trained writers do not necessarily know. Some would say these "knowledges" well up from the unconscious, from the "collective unconscious"—one thinks of Jungian analyses of fairy tales.

One of the things that Genius knows is that, as Jung has made so clear, personality is multiple. We are, individually, not a unity. That seems a perverse or at least oxymoronic use of language—an individual is not “one”? But the paradox serves to emphasize the point. I  (the present writer in his ego-manifestation) am many "I's". My name is legion.

Another thing: among those I's are arch-I's, archetypes they have been called; but they are not mere "models" or abstractions. It really is true that “I,” a man of such-and-such years, am also Eternal Youth, Princess, Hag, Old Wizard. I am also a gaggle of less definite minor beings, all of whom are quite willing to come up to center stage and pretend to be all of me anytime they get the chance. There is Scalawag, and Coward, and Nymphomaniac, Lecher, Sissy, Braggart, Brawler, Pater Familias, and at least a couple of dozen more spear carriers.

All of these characters, mixing it up, are involved in a story called My Life. I mean a real drama, not a soap opera. And if I am a storyteller who gets picked by Genius I get to have the ability to project this reality onto paper (whence it may re-emerge on film or stage). And other people witness it or read it, and are caught up in it, because the truth of me that Genius has been able to get down on the page is truth for them, too. One touch of Genius makes the whole world kin.

The archetypes and lesser I's are all here on the darkling field, rather like Arjuna's relatives; and there is battle. The battle (a.k.a. the “psychomacy) ends for me (End Times!) when I die, but not a split second sooner. The issue of My Life is: Who will rule?

The only empire I have is Me. Worldly empires are mere projections, more or less grand, of the Me Empire. It's an obvious fact of film or theater that the lowliest shoeblack among us has no trouble figuring out what "imperial contest" is all about when he sees it, writ large in books or drama, in terms of fierce masters, unruly servants, superb courtesans, etc. The reason that is so is because he has exactly that same constituency battling it out in him.

Another thing that Genius knows is that you don't need a lot of realistic detail on how your characters defecate, etc. Naturalist detail is hardly ever a prominent feature of good story. It bogs story down. Who needs it? We all know how to cook oatmeal; we all know you have to urinate and occasionally fart; we all know that most people have illicit sexual urgings and worse yet, do regrettable things from time to time. You can't make a good story out of any of that scatological stuff because our real life is not the scatology of the body, it is the eschatology of the Spirit. Real story, is, indeed, the track of Spirit. Without Spirit you don't have story, you have sociology. That's all right if you want sociology, but if you want story, it's a heartless bore.

Genius is aware of all this, but I don’t mean to imply that Genius emerges solely in stories. Sometimes it issues in poetry. Not all of it is like Shakespeare; often it is poetry without plots. For example, Whitman. The “I's” are all there. The contest for the Me Empire is there. But there's no story, or only hints of one. So Whitman engages only a relative few.

L'Amour engages millions. They love his actions and his settings (the mythic Old West is one of the best settings any writer ever had available, and L'Amour used it as well as anyone ever has.) And they love his characters. Think how they love the Sacketts!

But readers love L'Amour's stories chiefly because in them the good in us prevails over the bad in us, and the good in us desperately wants that to be so. In a L'Amour tale the Me Empire ends up commanded sanely by a man or woman committed to equity, honesty, family, neighborhood, and country. Corny, of course, but also universal. Accurate as to reality. True.

Now it happens that every last one of us seeks the good. Not even Adolph Hitler set out to be bad. Not Giles de Rais, the Marquis de Sade, or the particular son-of-a-bitch who is presently troubling your workplace with his misplaced notions of how the production line ought to proceed.

The trouble arises in identifying the good. That's where good story comes in. It tells us what the good is, what bad is. It teaches us, through delight in story, how we should conduct the Story of Ourownselves, what our life decisions should be. L'Amour, for example, does that.

I was set to writing this piece by reading his Last Stand at Papago Wells and suddenly seeing it as a modern Tempest. The parallels are striking. Let me suggest a few.

A strictly limited story-cosmos: In The Tempest, an island. In Last Stand a cluster of watering holes (Papago Wells) isolated in the southern Arizona desert.

A precisely limited time: Tempest: a night and a day. Last Stand: three or four days.

A community with a keen problem: Tempest, a need to get off the island and return to civilization. Last Stand: to get away from the Wells and hostile Indians and back to safety at the Army post. (In Last Stand the Indians are a pure force of Nature, not individualized, no more "evil" than storms in The Tempest. This is not the place to make political or racial points.)

In both stories the community's problem is really a projection of the protagonist's problem; he, as leader, must solve it for all: Tempest: Prospero has been feckless; he chose study and magic over public, political duty; he must find a way to go back to duty—become once again Duke of Milan. Last Stand: Logan Cates has been feckless, a drifter, a strong, principled man who has not taken up his share of the world's burdens, has not been the leader or "shepherd" he is called to be.

Every one of the other characters is an element that strengthens or weakens the protagonist. It would be more true to say these lesser figures are parts of the protagonist, either helping or hindering his struggle to realize himself in right decision and action; they are his multiple "I's."

Notable among these are the characters embodying anima, the soul's femininity:

Tempest: Miranda, the supremely feminine and virginal assent to Prospero's leadership, incarnating the support given him by his soul in his resolve to become at last the man he should be;

Last Stand: Jennifer and Junie, patrician and plain women, virgins both, who opt for Cates's leadership, because they realize he is both strong and good. And they respond to "strong" and "good."

Evil—strong evil, and weak, cowardly evil—is sprinkled around among the characters. (In Shakespeare there is comic evil, too. A weakness in L'Amour, perhaps, is the absence of it?) Caliban, Antonio, and Sebastian focus treacherous, conniving evil in The Tempest. Kimbrough, Zimmerman, and Webb are the betrayers in Last Stand.

In both stories one of the brightest, most attractive figures (again, projecting a real aspect of the protagonist) is the "eternal boy" (puer aeternus). Somewhat mischievous at first and then, when good is at last clearly in the ascendancy, a most faithful servant, a fertile source of energy and an agile power-to-do: Tempest—Ariel; Last Stand—Lonnie.

Both stories also involve the downside of the feminine—a forbidding and mysterious aspect: the hag, Sycorax in Tempest, Big Marie in Last Stand, reminding us that the Great Mother in her valence as Kali, the Destroyer, broods over the whole scene.

Man seeking his destiny in God is what story is about when it is good: how a man or woman, opposing evil, becomes one with God. We will settle for nothing less than apotheosis because nothing else is satisfying, a point Eckhart made and that no doubt contributed to his troubles with authority. Who wants to be less than the Greatest? Muhammad Ali was right about that, and we, his fans, were right to applaud and identify with his thrust. And, to a great extent, the way to Deity is through battle, made manifest in the wild contest of skilled white magic versus brute force in The Tempest and in a terrific final shoot-out in Last Stand.

You can go on working out details: in a good story all the warring elements in us—lust, greed, generosity, selflessness, and all the rest—are personified. The characters are elements of that inner community (the plurality that is a person) that must be effectively ruled by the protagonist's ego, aligned with (higher) Self, if the protagonist is to "succeed," is to "be realized in life."

I keep coming back in my own thoughts to an extremely curious fact of the great Hindu Book of God, the Bhagavad-Gita. This great text, a virtual Revelation for a people at once so godly and pacific (or so it used to be), has for us one message above all others. Krishna speaking (the Arnold verse translation):

But all thy dues discharging, for My sake,

With meditation centered inwardly,

Seeking no profit, satisfied, serene,

Heedless of issue— fight!

And I keep thinking of how perhaps the most inspired storyteller of our times has posed "the problem." As Solzhenitsyn wrote in a now famous passage: ". . . the line separating good and evil passes not through states, not between classes, not between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts."

The problem is not political, and it is not economic. "Marxist dialectic," so dear to the modern schoolmen, doesn't get near it. "Deconstruction" is a distant echo of a diversion of no importance. The real "problem," at the root of all literature worth our attention, is the contest of good and evil in each of us.

Good story succeeds in giving us renewed spirit for the battle that is our life, shows us how to choose the best, and thrills and inspirits us with an account of victory.

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