Death!

[marduk]

Iado ... interesting ... not to be found around here. I have always been interested in Aikido. Do you still practice?

Yup and will do until I die.

Not sure what part of the world you're in,this may help:
Canadian Iaido Association

Many Kendo places could point you in the right direction. It's a pretty small art in terms of practitioners.

 

[smcder]

Yup and will do until I die.

Not sure what part of the world you're in,this may help:
Canadian Iaido Association

Many Kendo places could point you in the right direction. It's a pretty small art in terms of practitioners.

Arkansas and the rural part ... (that's a joke).

The indigenous martial art is Redknekkendo. The art is distinguished by its emphasis on weapons from the earliest stages of practice. Many of these have been adapted from agricultural and automotive use:



This implement is known as a tararn and can be hurled (flung) or used in a slashing or swinging motion. Improvised weapons to include rocks and handfuls of dirt, tobacco spit in the eye, whiskey bottles and cigarettes are de rigueur.

The inner quality most prized in Redknekkendo is meanness and this is often associated with a physical type marked by a kind of wiry muscularity. A notable lack of size and physical presence in advanced practitioners often leads opponents to underestimate them.

The Arkansas Toothpick could be considered the katana of Redknekkendo:

Arkansas toothpick - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

... few practitioners can afford to own such a weapon and again, as improvisation is the rule, generally make do with knives bought at convenience stores for under $10 - pay cash and it's harder to trace.

 

[Constance]

Let us know if you do find that site - I'd like to see it ... is it posted in the C&P thread, maybe?

I don't remember posting it in that thread. I will search it out and post it.

Would we teach something about emotions? Mindfulness and awareness?

Ideally, yes. Children need to be taught ways in which to cope with their emotions in constructive and respectful ways and why it's important to do so -- because every child (and indeed every adult) they interact with is just like them in their emotional vulnerability and in the core value and integrity of all conscious beings (including animals, wild and domesticated) which we must mutually protect. I think that most young children know this instinctively but witness too much mistreatment of others (and often themselves) in their own homes, playgrounds, and schools -- and in mass media saturated with violence -- to be able to think and act mindfully about their behavior. Instead of being taught these lessons gently and supportively, they're presented with abstract rules and punishments for infractions. At least in recent years public education systems in some US states and other countries have begun to teach children the unacceptability of domestic violence and what they should do, and who they can talk with about it, if they witness or personally experience abuse in their homes.

 

[Constance]

I have often been stopped in my thinking tracks at various points in my life when I wonder about what my father was confronting under water as he fought to hold his breath, to resist the explosive need to open the throat, swallow all that water and drift suddenly into darkness. What were the last thoughts, final resignations and acceptances? His last words as the water pulled him out into the mouth of the lake were Go back! It's not safe, he yelled out to me across the water. Perhaps he knew he had saved his son from his own imminent fate and that this was enough? It's a conundrum I haven't been able to let go of. Some kind of doorway that I can't get through. Time to go shoot some hoops with my own son and give up on this chain of thinking. More important things to do.

I understand and empathize deeply with what you've gone through, Burnt. I've had the same experience. To a certain extent we can't help the way our minds turn back to these events that we can't change and can't fully understand. At a certain point, though, we can practice a gentleness with ourselves, turning our minds away from reliving or reimagining terrors and suffering that no longer exist. Those whose worst moments in this life still plague us no longer experience those moments. Those experiences are either sealed off in a peace that 'passes understanding' or are forgotten in new experiences in another kind of existence which, by all accounts, is peaceful, loving, healing, and productive. They no longer dwell in memories of pain and negativity they experienced while in the body, and to the extent that they are aware of what goes on in our mental lives, they do not want us to dwell in anxiety or pain over that which happened to them long ago, in the past, and for them is over and done with. The NDEs, after-death communications (both those personally experienced and those assisted by mediums), reincarnation research, past-life (and 'interlife') regressions, and the historical grounds of transpersonal psychology all support what I'm saying. My grief counselor, a transpersonal psychologist, taught me many things, among them that what helps the surviving consciousnesses (spirits) of our loved ones in the afterlife is our present well-being, our peace of mind, our joy in living in this difficult embodied lifeform, and the knowledge that this embodied life we endure is short and transitory, giving way to a further, more productive, fulfilling, and beautiful form of existence. As I've said, I have every reason by now to believe this, and I recommend to others in doubt the same paths my research has taken.

 

[smcder]

Yup and will do until I die.

Not sure what part of the world you're in,this may help:
Canadian Iaido Association

Many Kendo places could point you in the right direction. It's a pretty small art in terms of practitioners.

There are some Kendo practitioners in Little Rock ... There's a good Aikido teacher too ... lots of MMA of course and BJJ, far more than back in the day but all limited to the two populous centers in the state - I'm twelve miles from an incorporated area.

I do have plans to set up a heavy bag and I lift every day.

 

[smcder]

I don't remember posting it in that thread. I will search it out and post it.




Ideally, yes. Children need to be taught ways in which to cope with their emotions in constructive and respectful ways and why it's important to do so -- because every child (and indeed every adult) they interact with is just like them in their emotional vulnerability and in the core value and integrity of all conscious beings (including animals, wild and domesticated) which we must mutually protect. I think that most young children know this instinctively but witness too much mistreatment of others (and often themselves) in their own homes, playgrounds, and schools -- and in mass media saturated with violence -- to be able to think and act mindfully about their behavior. Instead of being taught these lessons gently and supportively, they're presented with abstract rules and punishments for infractions. At least in recent years public education systems in some US states and other countries have begun to teach children the unacceptability of domestic violence and what they should do, and who they can talk with about it, if they witness or personally experience abuse in their homes.

Very well written ... and timely with the media attention on domestic violence. I did a lot of work around this issue in the past and I'm currently doing a little informal social work for a friend.

The hypocrisy around our demand for larger, more aggressive athletes and "surprise" at steroid use and aggressive personal behavior is on us as a society.

I also got back in touch with my stepdaughter after ten years and her life has been greatly affected by domestic violence, before and after my time with her. I hope she'll be a part of my life from now on.

The cycle and dynamic of domestic violence is insidious and hard to understand from the outside. Patience and presence for as long as it takes, no matter how bewildering the behavior ... don't give up on someone in this situation. It may take a dozen attempts to leave an abuser.

 

[boomerang]

Another seemingly inexplicable phenomenon I've heard about and read about, too many times to simply dismiss: Those near death are much more likely to "pass over" at a time when no one, especially loved ones, are in attendance. There are numerous instances of family members holding the dreaded death watch, waiting for that last breath that means closure, leaving the room for a short period after many bedside hours and then learning that the person apparently "let go" and passed away while totally alone in the room. I find this to be somehow at once unsettling and comforting.

 

[Burnt State]

Large Red Man Reading

by Wallace Stevens

There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,
As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.
They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more.

There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life,
Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them.
They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality,

That would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost
And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves
And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly

And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae,
The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law:
Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines,

Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts,
Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are
And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked.


@Constance sent me down a bit of a Wallace Stevens journey through another article called, "The Poets of Reality," which then led me to this poem of life as we are here talking about the dead in the thread. A lot of literature is concerned so very much with all the living and the dead, and our reflections on one side of the barrier about what it must be like on the other side. In this poem the dead return, which is a very popular meme is it not, all across television and film, all the dead walking up out of graves, or suddenly just appearing alive again, messing with our social order? It's a wrench in the system for sure when the dead don't stay dead. What's that all about anyway? Are people not dying well anymore or is it about the fact that we no longer honour the dead and have a special place for them in society the way we used to? In this poem the dead return to be refilled with the form and feeling of that which they lacked. It seems to me we should better appreciate the pots, pans and tulips that are alive in the tapestry of our lives every day.

 

[Burnt State]

to reiterate that dead coming back meme - it's seems like we have an endless appetite for zombies and the dead returning do we not? Monkey's Paw anyone?

 

[Wade]

I signed up for a service called book bud, I get a daily email featuring a good selection of ebooks discounted from free to .99 to 2.99 for a limited time available on amazon and google play. There is usually a dozen listed, pretty much change almost daily and lean heavily towards what I would call little known authors. I don't think a day has gone bye where at least one of the books didn't feature a zombie apocalypse. Someone should being this matter up to Loren Coleman.

 

[Ufocurious]

Another seemingly inexplicable phenomenon I've heard about and read about, too many times to simply dismiss: Those near death are much more likely to "pass over" at a time when no one, especially loved ones, are in attendance. There are numerous instances of family members holding the dreaded death watch, waiting for that last breath that means closure, leaving the room for a short period after many bedside hours and then learning that the person apparently "let go" and passed away while totally alone in the room. I find this to be somehow at once unsettling and comforting.

It happened with us. My father was already under morphine (bone cancer) for a few days. And he would not go. The whole time either my mom, myself or both of us were there with him. Until my mom went home to take a shower.Then my uncle came to the hospital and wanted to talk to me in hallway. In those few minutes my father passed away.

 

[boomerang]

It happened with us. My father was already under morphine (bone cancer) for a few days. And he would not go. The whole time either my mom, myself or both of us were there with him. Until my mom went home to take a shower.Then my uncle came to the hospital and wanted to talk to me in hallway. In those few minutes my father passed away.

UFOCurious, There are too many accounts such as yours to simply dismiss as chance.

 

[smcder]

501 LIFE - Life-changing: Dog helps in struggle with Diabetes

Kerri already has several “just trust the dog” stories. On one occasion, she and Curtis were at a restaurant and had taken Roman with them to practice his public access when he began alerting. Deacon was with his grandparents, several miles away. “Roman wouldn’t settle down. He was not comfortable and kept pawing. He even crawled up in my lap,” Kerri said, explaining that no one at the restaurant appeared to be diabetic, so they ruled out that it was a false alert.

Kerri was skeptical but texted her mother-in-law and told her that Roman had alerted and asked if she would check Deacon, whose blood sugar was out of range. “Roman caught the low three and a half miles away!”

While dogs can typically smell up to a mile away, Kerri also thinks Roman is developing intuition when it comes to Deacon’s blood sugar as well as a special bond with her son. “He is truly something.”

 

[smcder]

The Skeptiko podcast has a number of good episodes recently ... including one with NDE Researcher PMH Atwater. There should be transcripts for all the interviews, I used to post good episodes, I just haven't checked in lately with them.
http://www.skeptiko.com/skeptico/
Atwater episode:
http://www.skeptiko.com/near-death-experience-after-effects-atwater/
Long-time NDE researchers and author P.M.H. Atwater reveals what she’s learned from the nearly 4,000 near-death experieners she’s studied.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with NDE researcher and author, P.M.H. Atwater. During the interview Atwater discusses the after-effects associated with NDEs:
Alex Tsakiris: Once we accept that near-death experience science overwhelmingly suggests that consciousness, in some way that we don’t understand, survives bodily death, I think you make a very good point about looking beyond NDEs at the broad range of spiritual experiences and trying to somehow understanding how they all fit together.
PMH Atwater: What I always look for is the pattern of after-effects, how that affects the individual’s life, how long-lasting is that, how that affects the lives of others. It’s always the after-effects.
I spend a lot of time in the book on after-effects, both with adults and children.

On the physiological end, there are definitive changes to the brain/mind assembly, to the nervous system, to the digestive system, and skin sensitivity.

 

[smcder]

to reiterate that dead coming back meme - it's seems like we have an endless appetite for zombies and the dead returning do we not? Monkey's Paw anyone?

Burnt, (where does your name come from? I've always meant to ask.)

I had written a real geewhizzbangg purple prose post on this and it disappeared into the Aether ... but basically it noted that all of our modern boogeymen are rolled into one in the zombie movie: population, wealth disparity, xenophobia, biophobia and Bill Murray.

The Monkey's Paw I always took to be a darker form of the warning issued in the sorcerer's apprentice for those who would use magic(k) or technology: simply, be careful what (and how) you wish for ...

 

[boomerang]

Burnt, (where does your name come from? I've always meant to ask.)

I had written a real geewhizzbangg purple prose post on this and it disappeared into the Aether ... but basically it noted that all of our modern boogeymen are rolled into one in the zombie movie: population, wealth disparity, xenophobia, biophobia and Bill Murray.

The Monkey's Paw I always took to be a darker form of the warning issued in the sorcerer's apprentice for those who would use magic(k) or technology: simply, be careful what (and how) you wish for ...

Our modern boogymen--who or what are they?

Always so difficult to characterize the current zeitgeist while living in its midst. One, if old enough, can only compare memories of society past. These must be always taken with one's own grain of salt because so much is warped by subjectivity of more youthful perception and the passage of time. The best we can do, perhaps, is compare and statistics for well documented behaviors. And even here, conclusions are plagued by subjective analysis and values changing between generations at an ever quickening pace.

Having said that--suggestions for books, blogs or whatever offering good dissections of the current time ghost are welcome. Almost gone, I think, are cinematic meditations of what makes current society tick of the kind that were so popular and insightful during the 1950's. Still, there is no shortage of inquiring minds that want to know. smcder, if you would care to re-construct your thoughts in purple, we would like to hearing them.

 

[smcder]

Our modern boogymen--who or what are they?

Always so difficult to characterize the current zeitgeist while living in its midst. One, if old enough, can only compare memories of society past. These must be always taken with one's own grain of salt because so much is warped by subjectivity of more youthful perception and the passage of time. The best we can do, perhaps, is compare and statistics for well documented behaviors. And even here, conclusions are plagued by subjective analysis and values changing between generations at an ever quickening pace.

Having said that--suggestions for books, blogs or whatever offering good dissections of the current time ghost are welcome. Almost gone, I think, are cinematic meditations of what makes current society tick of the kind that were so popular and insightful during the 1950's. Still, there is no shortage of inquiring minds that want to know. smcder, if you would care to re-construct your thoughts in purple, we would like to hearing them.

Sorry, they are gone ... I'll start over:

You ask who our modern boogeymen are and I think we know what we are afraid of ... comedians tell us more about this than horror films or politicians because they can get away with it.

Many or most of them are the same: death, pain, people who are different from us, infection ... some are new: pandemics, terrorism, body horror and the modern image of man as meat and number (Francis Bacon's paintings, the bureaucracy of genocide) man as biological robot - man as meat and machine in particular is key to the zombie craze.

Philosophical zombies are used to argue the illusion of consciousness ... the horror the hero has of seeing others bitten and infected to turn into a zombie is matched by his/her realization that he, unbitten - is simply a piece of meat and a biological robot, that there is no difference in the mindless hordes of zombies who do nothing but consume and the deterministic systems of neurons and gristle that are still considered human, whatever that means. The hero cannot escape his body and the body is going to die and rot.

The horror of the audience is then sublimated into a nihilistic consumerism ... and they find themselves strangely hungry after the film ends.

 

[Burnt State]

While dogs can typically smell up to a mile away, Kerri also thinks Roman is developing intuition when it comes to Deacon’s blood sugar as well as a special bond with her son. “He is truly something.”

I've heard all about these fine tuned dogs' noses who can sniff out all sorts of diseases in their family spaces but our dingo dog has yet to display any of these skills. Even when our daughter had been away in hospital for over a week you'd think he'd be mourning the absence of a pack member, or celebrate her return, but she was lucky if she got a couple of licks from that dog when she came back. She adores this creature but he gives little. Meanwhile, I was away for a weekend and when I got in through the door he was all over me like I had been away at the war or something. I could see my daughter's eyes roll back in her head with disbelief. He has never ever detected a low B.G. for her and so I doubt highly he'll be much good at sniffing out the cancer cells when that eventuality rolls around. Though, here's hoping that he's long dead and gone in a great big doggy boneyard well before that happens. Dogs! They're something alright.

This is a very good dog book among other things as is her autobiography, The Men We Reap - all about death.

 

[Burnt State]

The horror of the audience is then sublimated into a nihilistic consumerism ... and they find themselves strangely hungry after the film ends.

Our fascination with Horror movies in general is rather interesting as they are all about death, are they not? Expressed in all the sleepaway slumber slasher flicks, with Freddy, Jason, Franky, Chucky and good ole Michael Myers stalking us with finger blades, slingshots, knives and machetes, is our perpetual and absolute dread fear for our own mortality. It's what stops Hamlet from doing away with himself with his bare bodkin because, death, and what might come after, is something that troubles the will deeply as no one has returned from that undiscovered country to share what, if anything, comes next.

Personally, I don't feel that we've done well with either celebrating or respecting the dead, nor have we integrated death properly into the cities of the living. Sure there are our cenotaphs, monuments, obsidian walls, and falling water into holes in the centre of the city, not to mention all those improvised road side shrines following the latest crush of metal into flesh. But do the dead live with us, really? What do these markers really mean aside from saying, once upon a time so and so was born, lived, loved if they were lucky, then died. That's it, and nothing more. Nevermore.

I posted those images from films and tv series where The Dead are suddenly among us, as it's truly confusing. We don't know what to do with them really. We're struck dumb by the dead, like that character at the end of James Joyce's seminal short story, where all the living and the dead are united, for a brief ponderous moment, in the mind of that narrator. We just don't know what to do with them at all.

And so, like Kurtz, standing in that doorway at the edge of life and death, he cries out, "The horrror, the horror." Because that's all we've got. We journeyed out across the Nihilist River, after killing god and the planet, and now we rub dry thumbs together, wandering in underwater chambers till sea girls wrapped in seaweed wake us and we drown.

I wonder if Delacroix is implying that really, at the end of it all we still want
to hang on to whatever weak branch might keep us from the inevitable?

 

[Burnt State]

Burnt, (where does your name come from? I've always meant to ask.)

So here's a good post to exit on. Or maybe just one more, like Dylan Thomas, trying to negotiate last call at the bar...

A previous poster asked me the same thing a ways back and it compelled me to do some more detailed research about my familial origins. My dad had always translated our last name as "Burnt State" and joked that we descended from a long line of arsonists. The truth of the matter is a little more interesting. The following is from page 3 of the Music Thread:

Well i did some further searching and got a better translation of the name which was "a place cleared by burning" and I combined it with this opinion, "As far as I know the Brandstetters are from the Salzburg area, now Austria. A Brandstetter is an occupation. I forgot the meaning but I am going to find out. In 1710/1711 there was a bad pestilence epidemie in Europe. Many areas were vast after that. In Eastprussia up to two thirds of all the farms were not taken care of, because the people had died. In 1732 the king of prussia called settlers into his country to occupy the farms again. In the same time the protestants in the Salzburg area were not tolerated any more. So about 20,000 Salzburgers emigrated from Eastprussia, many with the name Brandstetter."

This tells me that me ancestors were those willing to burn pestilence ridden areas for reuse - now I see my ancestry as folks who were land reclamation plague workers.

So just two more pieces of media from me before I take my own sabbatical. The first is that Buttgereit movie referenced earlier, Der Tödesking. This movie affected me greatly as it was quite different than Schramm or Nekromantik as this was truly a meditation on death in all its forms. There was one particular sequence I was quite taken by, a bridge where the camera completes these very loving pans of various features of its concrete aches, while all along names and dates are being posted. If I was German I might know the bridge, but eventually I understood that this was a bridge of frequent suicides. This was an homage to the dead.

An ongoing motif in the movie is a dead body on a table, a still life you might say. Throughout the movie, in between the various death sequences where different people off themselves in very odd ways, we watch this body rot, slowly. And you know what, it's a pretty amazing thing. As is our mortality, and so we really need to extend our hearts out to those Ophelia's and Hamlet's in our lives, those who are feeling suicidal because they're not getting a chance to experience the Still Life, as there still is life. Like the image in the poster, even dwarves started small. We were all once born into the forever green field till time holds us green and dying. Better to sing in chains than surrender I've always thought. Still, one wonders what happens inbetween our own inbetweens? Once cherubic babe then turned king of death.