Yes yes yes
thank you jimbo.
Just your opening remarks so far. You leaving me in the dust with the transcender part. That is something I would like to reply to latter. I think I may be too much under influences of documented side effects of certain old hippy medications. Let me just start with mailer, that is easier for me now.
I have
know a lot of veterans jim, not just known them like sitting in a coffee shop in san antone at four in the morning and the guy on the next stool to me is wearing an satin jacket with the insignia of his outfit from when he was a participant in the south east asian war games of the sixties and seventines, a black horsey on a yellow shield, I suppose it was a calvary unit. How the subject came up I don't remember, but I think I could if i tried, but for now i want to try not to get side tracked anymore than I am, jesus: them commas are getting boring I better use a period pretty soon, any how my neighbor with the yellow horse told me that they teased him at work when he came home from vietnam. he was a postal worker, they would ask him if he killed anyone. and he would answer, "not today."
No I have known veterans from three wars intimately, as intimate as it gets running a sleeper team through the blizzards out west.
Everyone of those guys the ones that had seen it not from a desk job back at fort dix but right up close like maggots in their eyes, everyone one of those guys was the salt of the earth.
But I have talked to other veterans who I wonder about. One guy on the phone one night at the rosewater foundation told me he was a world war two vet. His solution to the ungrateful bastards in Iraq was to nuke them.
Obviously he had never walked the streets of of nagasaki with Ferlinghetti.
So Mailer was the real deal, I suppose. He went on one combat mission and wrote a great novel about it. Vonnegut was at the battle of the bulge, "a scout living behind enemy lines in useful terror , thinking mindlessly with his spinal cord" Spent seven months as a POW and witnessed the firebombing of Dresden. He adopted his sister's children when she died young. Pulitzer prizes, Mailer 2, Vonnegut 0. I realize this is not about comparing one writer to another who am I to judge. It is not about nice guys, it is about great literature. so I supppose vonnegut will always be a trashy quasi sci fi writer and mailer will be studied by scholars a thousand years from now.
Obviouly you can see now why I can't write about transcendence with then you now.
But I am too stoned all I can do is ramble right now
"I am the only hell my mama ever raised
she told me not to smoke it"
moron this later:
have thought somewhat about this development stuff versus ego transcendence, and beoieve that the development tasks are true and necessary, trust and autonomy the cornerstones
transcendencr is an adult function, but requires a developed psyche to attain this non-attainment state, and does not pre-clude the rational autonomous psuche, but rather compliments or envelopes it
Transcending Mailer
I just never could get interested in mailer. He writes so in authentically about violence I judge him on these words
Mailer wrote: "The psychopath murders -- if he has the courage -- out of the necessity to purge his violence, for if he cannot empty his hatred, then he cannot love."
What puts the ape in apricot? the cowardly lion asked.
Courage!
