Christopher yesterday told his mother a story of when he was "a little boy". He is now eight and must have been four or five. "I dreamt it all the time when I used to sleep in your bed, mother. I was going through a big tunnel that got smaller and smaller until there was a big explosion and I got real scared."
This morning I asked him to tell me the interesting dream he had told his mother. He said "I used to dream it a lot when I was real little". What was it? "There was a big bubble and the bubble began to get smaller and smaller until it burst and I was very frightened." It costs him nothing to repeat the story. He is calm. His blue eyes are untroubled and normally interested. He has no reflective afterthought but goes on to the next subject, drinks his orange juice, and asks for his gloves to go out in the cold.
Of all the children he seems to have had the least need to disguise the terrors of birth and the oedipal conflicts. (I once recorded his little chant on the latter subject.) The quality conforms generally to his open and cordial character.
December 1962 METRON letterhead
On Reading Toynbee's Study of History
History-writing has often in common with psychoanalytic work that both resort easily to proof by presence and proof by absence for whatever answer they wished to give to a problem. If a man is not acting to resist his father's image, he is acting to repress his resistance against his father's image. if the Romans had won at the Battle of Adrianople, their virtu would have been intact. As they lost, it was said to have been corrupted. Multiply this many times and you have much of Toynbee and some of psychoanalysis.
Toynbee is so voluminous too that numerous more flagrant contradictions pass muster.
Journal 1962 V 38
Sign in Office of Welfare:
THE LEGITIMACY PRINCIPLE
"No child should be brought into the world without a man -- and one man at that -- assuming the role of a sociological father."
Discovered by Dr. Bronislaw Malinowski, 18-- -19--
In Court
"Every child should have a legal father."
___________________
In Island First Baptist Church
"Child, know thy father"
Bible
Woman's House
"A Baby is the Fruit of Love"
1962
President Kennedy argues falsely when he says pray in the family and in the church and thus accepts the Supreme Court's reasoning about prayer in the schools. He is irrelevant: you do not tell a man to seek justice in his family and neighborhood, when he cannot find it in his city or country; injustice still is there. Furthermore, if religiousness is harried out of the school, a vacuum remains to be filled by materialistic and chauvinistic values. I would write a better prayer, but a prayer in itself is light, and hope, and imagination expressing itself in often otherwise drab and meaningless circumstances. As such it suffuses, even if only slightly, a large area of learning and life. The Supreme Court's position regarding prayer, and generally its fanatical narrowness respecting religion and the Constitution are wrong and the Court should be circumvented, defeated, and ultimately reoriented.
1962
On Strauss' book (essay by Professor Leo Strauss' former students)
-- A bundle of mediocre essays tied together by a malediction.
-- A dangerous effort to create a school by destroying another.
In addition to being bad in other respects this is bad in that it creates by léger-de-main an illusion which is supposed to be attacking another illusion.
1962
I have felt and recognized every evil impulse ever attributed to man.
Both sense and awareness are needed to know evil
And control to make the knowledge useful.
Control inserted by lucky mysterious genetics and early combinations.
One doesn't realize that it exists until he reflects on what he has
thought and notices
And discovers that he is alone and has been walking
Through a storm of shot and shell and everyone he remembers
Is in a shell-hole or ditch behind.
1962
Journal
If the world is not determined as we today think and believe it is, according to laws of nature and rules of science, rather than according to the many more pleasant and satisfying myths of other and past ages, then we shall have been victims of the most unhappy of theories of life and being, rather than sponsors of ultimate and definitive truths.
Considering the flimsy premises upon which our positivism of nature ------ human and non human --- is based, we are indeed in peril of this wretched fate that will be marked by the historians of the future. For not Siva, not Baal, nor many other miserable gods are worse than our non-gods. Our only scant hope is that we have exchanged happiness for hard truth. But if the truth be not hard, then we are twice cursed in our age.
1962
A word for the important
The world agencies crawl on all fours scratching, a spider whose claws are metalized scraping the fine hide of time with maddening noises and bloody gashes. Its motto 'go nowhere fast' 'live like the least', 'wait and you shall be given' 'you now have 70 years -, we must find ways of making them all unproductive". A poet has longer to murder himself in. He once could say 19 and die of exhausted fulfillment. Now he has no excuses; he cannot excusably do anything. He has health, grants, social security, compliant women, dependency benefits for his children -- what the hell does he want? Sit and wait. The great soup-ladle will pass your way -- it will be the Ford Foundation pap or the Fed government exchange fellowship or the journal that will carry anything -- condition of all is "don't call names. Don't be impolite. Don't shit in public. See your psychologist regularly. Be a good father. Be a good mother too. (The treatment is bisexual, the difference is small) in the tablets taken duly. File now - wait for next June to find out if you can to something the year after next. Don't hurry us. We are on a payroll and we only do something different six years from now for six months. Sabbatic -- think. What a horrid notion of 19th century Baptists or puritans -- every seventh year.
Mind you -- Patience is divine! But so is impatience? patience is not to wait in line at the Post Office, the Foundation window, the supermarket cash register, patience is to wait for death in a seemly way, not to run for cover when the enemy charges. Damn these men who get the highest social rewards for sending letters telling people that they were carefully considered. I believe in the Man who says no right off and that's it -- why pretend, why excuse. And who decides now for now, not adds -- and you should have applied years from now. And who judges an action of some silly part of a man instead of the man - so that everybody avoids and evades.
There must be something on the whole man and how he is being torn apart.
The poll tax is a whole man tax.
Grants and awards should be whole man awards.
The vote is a whole man thing. It should go to a whole man, not an issue or party.
Applied Social Science vs. Pure Social Science
asserting that as e. g. with concept of power, you cannot go for all with a pure political science since the meanings of any concept are put into it by the people who have their private incoherent reasons. Further any concept can contain the universe. Where to go with it is the question. Therefore Application is the only thing that can give it limit. So applied science is really the fundamental science. Pure science is secondary and a method of formulation primarily.
Same in natural science.
Ideas of Unimportance, practicalism, and vocationalism have crept into the idea of applied science, so that scientists have come to scorn it.
