The Life and Mind of Cornelius Anatole
It is possible, although highly unlikely, that some of those poor lost souls who happen upon this website will want to know more about its author. More likely is the scenario in which the gentle reader will wonder: "who the f*ck does this guy think he is, anyway?"I write this on the 50th anniversary of the legal battle over the publication of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl". Ginsberg is a great inspiration to me in many ways. I will begin my self explanation by quoting from his "Ego Confession": "I want to be known as the most brilliant man in America, who saw Blake and abandoned God and overthrew the CIA with a silent thought... I want to be the spectacle of Poesy triumphant over trickery of the world Omniscient breathing its own breath thru tear gas spy hallucination whose common sense astonished gaga Gurus and rich Artistes who called the justice department & threaten'd to Blow the Whistle Stopt Wars, turned back petrochemical Industries' Captains to grieve & groan in bed Chopped wood, built forest houses & established farms distributed monies to poor poets & nourished imaginative genius of the land . . . . " Or something like that. Except that, like Alcibiades, my ambition extends well beyond the borders of my own nation.
I am a fiftyish Pagan/Hindu/Buddhist living in the suburbs of a major East Coast city in the U.S. I am deliriously happily married to a woman that I have known and loved since I was 23. I work in the "information technology" field, and I have a PhD in Chemistry (and a BA in Linguistics, of all things). My PhD was in "non-linear dynamics" ("chaos theory"), and I have published scientific papers and book chapters in a variety of subjects in Chemistry and Biochemistry.
I consider myself to be a Pagan, a Hindu and a Buddhist. I have at times described my "path" as Anarcho-Shamanism. The Buddha was, in my opinion, a Pagan - and in India Paganism means Hinduism (at least in my opinion - an opinion shared by Pythagoras and Apollonius of Tyana, among others). At the very moment that the Buddha attained enlightenment he was praying to the Earth Goddess - if that ain't Pagan then I don't know what is. And as has been described very nicely by Rick Fields in his book How the Swans Came to the Lake, the first "western" Buddhists were people like Alexandra David-Neel, Allan Bennett, Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott - all good Pagans, in my opinion. Just like me. Maybe a little crazy, maybe more than a little full of crap, too. Again, perhaps, just like me.
And I am a leftist. Oooooh - I know how scary that can be to a lot of people. I remember Garrison Keillor once joked that he was a "communist sympathizer", and someone retorted (on cue), "but I thought there weren't hardly any communists left?" Keillor replied - "that's why I have sympathy for them." In fact, like a surprising number of the architects of the invasion of Iraq I am an ex-Trotskyist. Unlike the neo-cons, though, I have not gone over to the dark side - I've merely become less doctrinaire, or so I would like to think. On many days I'll actually claim to be an Anarchist, and I can quote from Bakunin and Malatesta and Makhno to prove it.
This website is part of my little contribution to completely changing the world. Lenin said "we must make a revolution with people as they are right now." In a way he was right - but in another way he was wrong. A simplistic and mechanical insistence that "consciousness" has no reality or life of its own - that it is wholey and linearly determined by the "material conditions" - just doesn't cut it in my opinion. On the other hand, the slogan of the Yogacarins, that "You should view the nature of the Universe as created by Mind Alone" is perhaps overstated. I think ideas are important. I think that the way in which we view the world and ourselves matters. A lot.
A spectre is haunting humanity. It is the spectre of a unipolar world run by the people who run the United States and a handful of other uber-nations. This unipolar world is not some strange new phenomenon - it is merely an extension of the European conquest of the world that began in 1492 - a conquest that was conducted in the the name of the spread of Christianity and the eradication of Paganism. That spiritual and psychological conquest is now being extended ever more deeply into the mind/psyche/soul/conciousness of every human being on this planet. It is becoming ever more difficult to imagine a world different from the one we live in - in large part due to the ever increasing cultural homogeneity of human society. In order to continue being able to imagine a different world, we have to better understand what Allen Ginsberg called Moloch:
"What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities! "
"Cornelius Anatole" may or may not be my real name. This website is about ideas, not personalities or persons. Please don't believe anything you read here - or what you read anywhere else, either. Unless, that is, you have come to genuinely know for yourself that it is true. Gnothi Seauton - Caveat Lector
11-15-2006 Somewhere in the belly of the Beast
If you really want to - you can send me email. Here is a gif image with my email address - it's not a link:
