BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Jabberwocky

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

'Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!'

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood a while in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One two! One two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

'And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Lewis Carroll

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

From April 10, 2006

It's Passover and you're out of Mogen David:

Now Maria's making charoses
She's using Dubonnet
You might think it to be atrocious
-- But it's better than Chardonnay.

mek

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

I have always been rasped by the banal. But how can that be? I am one of the bourgeois manque, defective, never having achieved what I might have, certainly never having met my own expectations. I spend too much of my time repining after the lost and gone. It's a fugitive pain, now here, now not, but always that stab of longing and regret.

Thomas Mann mentions the bliss of the commonplace. The seductive beauty of innocent bliss, even the seduction of the banal. I feel sorrow for my loss of naivete-- but that seems so commonplace too--nostalgic, if you will.

I know my writings are deeply felt--by me--but they are, sadly, inept.

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

From Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart:

"As a man dances the drums beat for him."

There were outsiders who wept louder than the bereaved."

"On Sundays he always imagined that the sermons were preached for the benefit of his enemies."

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

The Mirror In The Front Hall

The luxurious house had a huge mirror
in the front hall, a very old mirror,
bought at least eighty years ago.

A good-looking boy, a tailor's assistant
(on Sundays an amateur athlete),
stood there with a package. He gave it to one of the household
who took it in to get the receipt.
The tailor's assistant,
left alone as he waited,
went up to the mirror, looked at himself,
and adjusted his tie. Five minutes later
they brought him the receipt. He took it and went away.

But the old mirror that had seen so much
in its long life-
thousands of objects, faces-
the old mirror was full of joy now,
proud to have embraced
total beauty for a few moments.

Constantine P. Cavafy

Walls

With no consideration, no pity, no shame,
they have built walls around me, thick and high.
And now I sit here feeling hopeless.
I can't think of anything else: this fate gnaws my mind -
because I had so much to do outside.
When they were building the walls, how could I not have noticed!
But I never heard the builders, not a sound.
Imperceptibly they have closed me off from the outside world.

Constantine P. Cavafy

Comment: We'll have to find a better translation of Walls, a poem with much meaning for me; "who built these walls? -- me," for starters.

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

El Gaviero says:
-
"Even though obviously I am going to die someday, as long as I live I am immortal."
-
"They're old friends, so old that everything's already been said."
-
And one more, El Gaviero quotes Sancho Panzo:
-
"Each man is how God made him. Some even worse."

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
Gommorah:

The Mafia without Hollywood Glamor.

This is a picture of the Mafia that we don't get from Hollywood. Uneducated men who live dirty, crude and sweaty, without Mafia "honor." Huge profits going to unseen men while the underlings scramble for euros and cheat each other. Mafia widows nickle & dimed out of their promised Mafia pensions...A land (Sicily) destroyed by illegal pollution and deliberate use of the land for cheap illegal toxic waste disposal...it goes on and on.

This is more a documentary than a fiction.

I don't know whether to recommend it--maybe you already know its subject matter. But you never saw the type of camera work used here. It matches the story exactly. Cheap, crude, dusty. And every actor seems to have been taken straight from prison...

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry makes all things easy. unknown

What we have often starts to own us. Goenka Chanting

Translations (like wives) are seldom strictly faithful if they are in the least attractive. unknown

Unemployment Insurance: Continued Claims Over 5.5 Million

Unemployment Insurance: Continued Claims Over 5.5 Million

Posted using ShareThis

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

One thing about a diet: there are a lot fewer dishes to wash. mek

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Wall Street, often ahead of the rest of us, seems to disagree with your evaluation of the first weeks of President Obama's administration.

And your evaluation of the man who brought us to the point of national bankruptcy on financial as well as on political ground is very interesting, though skewed somewhat to the right.

I am always amazed at the blindness of conservatives. Tell me how many recruits to terror has the war on terror garnered since Bush has been in office. Tell me how much Blood and Treasure has been wasted on an unnecessary war.

Under President Bush financial regulations were ignored or tossed, and we find ourselves broke. Our country has the 27th best record for medical care in the industrialized world. There aren't many industrialized countries behind us. We have over 47 million folks without any insurance and our auto industry is collapsing. We exported millions of jobs overseas and now we are losing millions more jobs even without exporting the jobs. People are hanging out on corners.

I live on the beach in Ft. Lauderdale. Recently people have started sleeping on the beach.

I find it notable and just plain stupid that the auto industry never called for Single Payer Universal Health Care even though they knew that employer based insurance was costing them more than steel, and was costing them market share, and finally, was driving them out of business. Why not? They were stifled, blinded by rusty ideological beliefs that were imposed on them by the libertarian-conservative brain-washing in the medea.You know who I mean, Ayn Rand was only a writer. Milton Friedman is dead but this debacle is burying his coffin even deeper. This is the second or maybe third death for poor Milton.

In February of 2003 you wrote,

'Almost all of them have a strong ideological bias against making individuals primarily responsible for their own retirement income and a sharp distaste for programs that benefit “the rich." ' Imagine if you had gotten your way and everyone had their retirement money invested in the market. Now, social security seems a lot more secure for the average man. Can you imagine the average citizen choosing his own investments? Crazy?

I see that you are an expert on pension and benefit plans. I am an amateur and only know about the one in which my employees participated. Employers contributed around 6% of payroll, the fund (multi-employer Taft Hartley) grew to almost $10 Billion. During the last 28 months the fund shrunk to $8.75 Billion.From what I hear the employees are okay and the fund will continue to pay pensions.

But what about the Benefit plan? Well, that costs a lot more. Close to 21% of payroll. the workers, on average, are at the low end of hourly workers. The fund takes in about a billion dollars a year and pays it all out. It's a generous plan that up now had no co-pays and paid for almost everything, excepting dental, and covers prescriptions in full when Medicare pays for other expenses.

Pretty good for the employees, right? Tough on us employers. But what is the per-capita cost? 2006 cost per covered life was $3800.

There are about 400,000 beneficiaries and 150,000 active workers.

The plan covers from pre-natal, through age 65 and continues to pay for rxs until death. No co-pays. (I think that is going to change)

The cost per active employee is around $7800. The one factor which I cannot calculate is the effect of COBs(Coordination of Benefits) which occurs when each spouse has benefits from two different benefit plans. I think that this is a significant number which, if known, would increase the true cost per covered life.

I understand that Medicare's administrative cost is less than 3%, our administrative cost is less than 7% -- and insurance companies administrative costs plus profits range as high as 22%.

If the USA had a Single Payer Universal Health Care plan in place it would cost less than the $3800 that our plan costs. But let's say it costs $3800 per capita. 300,000,000 citizens times $3800 is 1.14 Trillion dollars.

But wait! Subtract from that 1.14 trillion dollars the 1.4 Trillion dollars that we are currently spending on health care for a 353,000,000, people, leaving out 47 million people, and you can see that we would save money and cover more lives with a well run Single Payer (yes, that means the government) Universal Health Care program.

Most docs and hospital administrators agree with me.

Worried about government bureaucrats? What about Insurance company administrators who decide what meds you may take and what docs you may see?

It's very important to think for the other side and to converse with knowledgeable people on the other side too. I am sure that you know some professionals with brains equal to yours. Call them.

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

A friend gave my son four tickets to a Ranger game.

Decent seats, but not the best in the house--$165 each! He took my granddaughter and two of her friends--10 year old girls, but sports nuts.
Then he spent $40 for hot dogs and sodas!. Just think:

$660 for tickets
$30 for food
$20 ? for taxi.

$710. Now my son's friend apparently has these tickets as a season ticket.I guess when he goes it's all adults-- How much do they spend on food and beer?

Who goes to these things?

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Several Favorite American Novels Not Read Since High School:
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis
U.S.A., John Dos Passos
Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Studs Lonigan, James T. Farrell
Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
Appointment in Samarra, John O'Hara
The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Absalom, Absalom, William Faulkner

____________________________
Some remembered Important Books read in High School

The Education of Henry Adams
An American Doctor's Odyssey ( ? )
Microbes & Men (?) was this in High School?

__________________________________________
A Mindsetting Book of Essays read at Horace Mann

A Preface to Our Day. --essays by :
Geo. Bernard Shaw, On Literature
Fredrich Hayek, Free Market Economist (before Ayn Rand) economist
G.D.H. Cole, a Fabian, Historian, Novelist, Intellectual Labor Party Activist
S.I. Hayawaka, Linguist, Congressman, War Hero.
Aldous Huxley, On the future. __I must find this and see what he predicted___
J.B. Priestly, On Science
Herbert Hoover, on Economics
Chas. Darwin, Of course, on Evolution
Sidney & Beatrice Webb, American Socialists, NYU Economists
and many others

___________________________________

Some other literature read at Horace Mann

Hamlet
Macbeth
Richard the Third
Ivanhoe
Paradise Lost (Liked it. saw Satin as the hero)
Brothers Karamozov
War & Peace (Too long, didn't finish until my thirties)
Pride & Prejudice (hated it)
Crime and Punishment
Several John Marquand novels that I liked (summer stuff)

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

For my Aunt Anne and my mother, who called her Annie Laurie

The earliest known version by Lady John was published by James Lindsay of Glasgow and is:

Maxwelton's braes are bonnie,
Where early fa's the dew,
'Twas there that Annie Laurie
Gi'ed me her promise true.
Gi'ed me her promise true -
Which ne'er forgot will be,
And for bonnie Annie Laurie
I'd lay me down and dee.

Her brow is like the snaw-drift,
Her neck is like the swan,
Her face it is the fairest,
That 'er the sun shone on.
That 'er the sun shone on -
And dark blue is her e'e,
And for bonnie Annie Laurie
I'd lay me down and dee.

Like dew on gowans lying,
Is the fa' o' her fairy feet,
And like winds, in simmer sighing,
Her voice is low and sweet.
Her voice is low and sweet -
And she's a' the world to me;
And for bonnie Annie Laurie
I'd lay me down and dee.

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

I'm bruised inside
from the
punches I've pulled.

Keven Whelan

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

As an overly loved child in a home in wartime Forest Hills, K. had only one consolation: the belief that one day he would become a great poet. Aside from his parents, the indifference and contempt of most of the children around him only reinforced his sense of destiny, for in Forest Hills poets were more likely to be scorned than to be revered. Over the ensuing years, Michael came to lead the paradigmatic poet’s life of wasteful time spent behind a drugstore counter, loneliness, ruinous love affairs and constant sexual scandal.

But he will never attain anything like greatness.

As recalled by K. in his magnificently humane factional autobiography, what might be cruel farce achieves pathos and genuine exaltation. After a several years in a special school for promising children Katz ventured into the verge of the real world; but fearing that he would become lost, stayed too close to home.

A collection of friendships saves K's life from complete failure and barrenness. The novel brilliantly portrays the essence of friendship which early on K decides is his life's talent.

Later K’s self-thwarted ambition drives him onward–and into the orbits of an unstable spiritualist, Madam Lulu, a voodoo priestess recommended by his friend Father H; a shady entrepreneur selling worm farms, Clive Cliveson; and several susceptible, but interesting women.

His autobiographical faction demonstrates how the creative spirit can survive as an ember in even the most crushing environment and even the most unpromising human vessel.

At the end he looks back and sees that his peculiar sexual obsessions prevented him from attaining his childhood dreams; and were nothing more than a diversion from the work required by reality.

Comment by mg

Poet's look forward. K's vision of the future is clouded by his persistent view of the gloomy past. K was educated in the Romantic poets. Despondency dispels poetic vision. mg

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Remember: An insurance company will never insure unless there is little chance of having to pay.

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Radical Phenomenology (from the New School Catalog)

Stefano Gonnella



To be a scholar in phenomenology does not mean to be a phenomenologist. To do phenomenology does not mean to know thoroughly the precepts of Husserlian scholarship, but rather to be able to apply the phenomenological method to precise analytical fields. This is not to say that scholarship, history of thought, or philological exegesis of manuscripts are useless; this is merely to say that they are quite different things in regard to the actual practice of phenomenological analysis. The future of phenomenology relies on the understanding of this basic difference.

The Husserlian method requires the purification of all the unexplored assumptions that underlie and support our everyday life. (1) It is the neutralization of background presuppositions, by applying a sophisticated technique of suspension known as epoché, that allows to access a field of investigation where one should apprehend the “things themselves.” This field of manifestation is the field of “pure phenomena.” According to Husserl, “to one truly without prejudice it is immaterial whether certainty comes to us from Kant or Thomas Aquinas, from Darwin or Aristotle, from Helmholtz or Paracelsus.” (2) We have to see with our own eyes and we must not change under the pressure of preconceptions what we plainly see. (3) Here we find, worded in a very precise formulation, the intuitive and descriptive nature of phenomenological method. Nevertheless, while acknowledging Husserl’s thoroughness and exactness, there is further room to raise an essential question: is the epoché really able to hit and to put out of circuit all possible presuppositions, completely purifying the field of investigation from prejudices and not yet acquired assumptions? (4) Can we proceed along the path of phenomenology, trusting its method as a well arranged and reliable theoretical tool, or must we begin instead, as impenitent sceptics, with an attentive critique of phenomenology itself?

These are not new questions, yet they acquire particular meaning for contemporary and future phenomenology. The value of an analytical method, its significance, is located in the ability to transmit the method itself from its founder to other researchers. In this way the method, being employed by quite different scholars to carry on new analyses in the field, can be directly verified and proved with regard to its function and effectiveness. (5) To test a method, one needs to practice it. This sentence, perhaps stating the obvious, may not be the truism it seems. From what other external criteria should the query into the phenomenological method be guided? Could phenomenology be submitted to a non-phenomenological inquiry? Once again, nothing new: phenomenology, as Husserl used to exhort himself, should be submitted to a phenomenological analysis. (6) So, one of the unavoidable tasks for a future phenomenology is to carry out a phenomenology of phenomenology. How could one approach and realize such a paradoxical task?

Once the epoché is performed and the thesis of natural attitude has been bracketed, the sphere of pure phenomena offers itself to the phenomenologist’s eyes. The field of the originary is open, so the analysis and the phenomenological description can finally be developed. Inside the phenomenological practice we find intuition, as the so-called “principle of all principles” teaches us. (7) Intuition is the actual core of phenomenologist’s gaze is. It is the rightly intended intuition, according to Husserlian fundamental rules, that would drive us to the exact phenomenological apprehension of essences.

In a slightly more technical way, what is phenomenologically originary persists as irreducible after the performance of epoché. Without further reference to anything else, this originary manifests itself as self-givenness (Selbstgegebenheit), as something that a peculiar intuition can grasp as its adequate fulfilling (Erfüllung). One of the questions left open by this theoretic engine is just the phenomenological purity of Anschauungen, of the intuitions that would hold and corroborate phenomenologist’s work. In other words, the rigour and the authenticity of phenomenological attitude involves a correct singling out of the horizon of the so-called originary self-givenness, the Selbstgegebenheiten which are the direct objects of intuition and the sole warranty of the validity and the consistency of analysis. To clarify the role of intuition would help us decipher the well-known motto “zurück zu den Sachen selbst!” and to finally grasp the phenomenological sense of that movement backwards (zurückgehen) towards the “things themselves”. (8)

Therefore, proceeding phenomenologically into phenomenology itself primarily implies inquiring into the intuitive ground of Husserl’s method. This is just the task undertaken by Domenico Antonino Conci, an Italian phenomenologist whose work is mainly known to a narrow range of scholars and students. Since the seventies, Conci set up a reform of the classical Husserlian method opening a research stream that could be properly named “Radical Phenomenology”. With “Radical Phenomenology” one intends a kind of analysis dealing with phenomenological residues singled out by radical epoché: this epoché, unlike the Husserlian one, does not only bracket the natural attitude, but also suspends the wider and more complex sphere of objectivation. This sphere is actually the matrix of some obstacles that turned up to vitiate Husserl’s own research.

The risk of aporetic paths inside classical phenomenology has been clearly noticed and then handled by other phenomenologists as well. But, it is precisely this “phenomenology of phenomenological method”(9) that managed to display a week point of the Husserlian analytic, showing how its intuitive ground is affected with some presuppositions of non-phenomenological nature. It has been Conci’s endeavour to bring phenomenology to its utmost consequences, radicalizing the epoché and suspending what can really be suspended in the field of presence, without paying hidden tributes to the Western philosophical tradition. This is exactly what Husserl did not avoid doing and therefore remained imprisoned within what Conci calls “categorial structure” (10). In virtue of this structure, classical phenomenology proceeds to a concealed objectivation of phenomenological data, identifying the origins of sense with immanent lived-experiences (Erlebnisse) of a transcendental ego. (11) The radical epoché extends the classical Husserlian epoché and thereby suspends what according to Husserl was in fact irreducible, i.e., the egological pole, the sphere of the transcendental I. (12)

While the distinction between consciousness and the ego has been established by Husserl himself, radical phenomenology further suggests that the irreducible residue of radical epoché is a basic impersonal lived-experience. It is a non-ego-centered consciousness that manifest itself as actual “self-givenness”, i.e. as a datum that really “gives itself by itself” (always into the phenomenological praxis, certainly not into the physics or the natural sciences): this is identified as the authentic Selbstgegebenheit. (13)

Schematically speaking, the subject appears to be constituted in virtue of the structure that remains invisible through the Husserlian method: the variation/invariance structure. (14) This categorial structure is the basic intentional structure of Western thought, our objectivating logos. It consists of a functional relationship between an invariant pole (eidos) and a plane made by an indefinite sequence of variations (to be intended as individual metamorphosis of the eidos). The variations get their lacking sense, either ontological or logical, from the invariance, meanwhile the invariance works as a principle, as a rule, and as a unity of connection for the whole range of variations.(15)

Radical epoché affects each intentional construction and thus also the I that is enclosed therein. By striking the assessment of the ego as an obvious datum, by placing into question the idea that the ego would be endowed with absolute and exclusive existence, the radical epoché comes to show how the ego is nothing more than the unity pole (eidos) of the sequence of numberless activities (variations) usually referred to consciousness. The ego-centered consciousness then does not enjoy any preferential statute, but rather is constituted like any other object.

In virtue of its radicalization, phenomenology dismantles the idea that the categorial attitude is the only possible attitude (16), the unique and absolute form of consciousness. The Western basic intentional structure, underlying our natural attitude, is an objectifying structure. Radical phenomenological analysis shows how this logos of objectivation, ruling both common and scientific cognitive posture, comes to effect on the basis of the variation/invariance structure. So the possibility of suspending this structure within the analytical domain discloses a further huge field of research. To deal with the impersonal consciousness implies a widening of the traditional phenomenological interests towards the domains of cultural anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, paleoethnology, etc., in other words, of every human science that under some respect deals with cultures and human communities far from the Western logos, in either space or time. (17)

In brief, this new phenomenological frontier marks the land of a transcultural anthropology which can be fruitfully explored only through an analytical method that suspends the absoluteness of Western logical and categorial principles. (18) This means trying to analyze sense-structures bound and embodied in the most dissimilar cultural signs. After all, the question about the method could be taken on and resolved in this way, for in phenomenology there is an unavoidable interaction between method and field of analysis. Usually one begins by employing broad models, and then along the way, tools and techniques undergo improvement through the direct comparison with evidences and signs. But to assert that phenomenological method forms itself through phenomenological analysis is also to say that the real theoretic and technical value of the method can arrive at a critical explication as the phenomenological field of observation extends and fixes itself, and vice versa. (19)

Notes
(1)“Access to phenomenology demands a radical reversal of our total existence reaching into our depths, a change of every prescientifically-immediate comportment to world and things as well as of the disposition of our life lying at the basis of all scientific and traditionally-philosophical attitudes of knowledge.” Eugen Fink, “What Does the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl Want to Accomplish?,” Research in Phenomenology, 2 (1972), p. 6.
(2)Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” Husserl Shorter Works, eds. Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press - The Harvester Press, 1981), p. 196.
(3)Cf. ibid.
(4)Cf. Edward G. Ballard, “On the Method of Phenomenological Reduction, Its Presuppositions, and Its Future,” Life-World and Consciousness. Essays for Aron Gurwitsch, ed. Lester E. Embree (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), p. 110.
(5)Cf. Domenico A. Conci, Prolegomeni ad una fenomenologia del profondo (Roma: Università di Roma, 1970), p. 11.
(6)Cf. Enzo Paci, Funzione delle scienze e significato dell’uomo (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1963), p. 249.
(7)The principle declares that“every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily offered to us in ‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there.” Edmund Husserl, Ideas, First Book (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), p. 44f.
(8)Antonio Zirión Q., “The Call ‘Back to the Things Themselves’ and the Notion of Phenomenology,” Husserl Studies 22 (2006), p. 31f.
(9) Cf. Domenico A. Conci, La conclusione della filosofia categoriale. Contributi ad una fenomenologia del metodo fenomenologico (Roma: Edizioni Abete, 1967).
(10) Cf. Domenico A. Conci, L’universo artificiale. Per una epistemologia fenomenologica (Roma: Spada, 1978) n. 3, p. 14.
(11)“This search for an ultimate and final apodictic foundation, which, following the Cartesian paradigm, can only lie in the ego (cogito, ergo sum), is never given up by Husserl, no matter how much his actual emphasis might be directed at other “phenomena.”” Sebastian Luft, “Husserl’s Theory of the Phenomenological Reduction: Between Life-World and Cartesianism,” Research in Phenomenology, 34 (2004), p. 207.
(12)“On what authentically phenomenological basis is the unsuspendable residue to be identified, as Husserl would have it, with the sphere of transcendental subjectivity?” Domenico A. Conci, “Disinterested Praise of Matter: Ideas for Phenomenological Hyletics,” Analecta Husserliana LVII (1998), p. 50.
(13)Cf. ibid., p. 52.
(14)Cf. ibid., p. 53.
(15)Cf. Domenico A. Conci and Angela Ales Bello, “Il tempo e l'originario. Un dibattito fenomenologico,” Il Contributo, II, 5-6 (Roma 1978), p. 16.
(16)“The logos of objectivation (…) is a sense structure polarized in an invariant moment (…) and in a moment to be understood as an orderable sequence of individual variations crossed by the invariant as the unitary principle towards which all these moments must necessarily converge. Functionally related with each other, these polarities constitute an altogether general intentional structure, a structure of connection, order and comprehension,” Domenico A. Conci, “Disinterested Praise”, p. 51.
(17)Domenico A. Conci, La conclusione della filosofia categoriale,p. 79.
(18)“Thus, it is quite evident that the phenomenological residue of a radical epoché is constituted by a true ‘cultural continent’ (…) where the elementary lived experiences reveal a morphology and a lawfulness of connection which go beyond those already visualized by classical analysis, which has confined itself to complex Western experiences.” D. A. Conci and Angela Ales Bello, “Phenomenology as the semiotics of archaic or ‘different’ life experiences. Toward an Analysis of the Sacred,” Phenomenology Inquiry, XV (1991), p. 125.
(19)Cf. ibid., pp. 110ff.

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

Early this morning I woke and as I reached for my glasses on the night table so that I could read the clock that turned out to indicate 3:30, I recalled a dream involving a group of men and one woman who came to the drug store regularly to send Western Union Money Transfers. At the time, there was a government regulation that transactions of $10,000, and more should be reported to a government entity--which one escapes me.

Each of the transactions brought to me by this group were under $10,000, usually between $8,500 and $9,500. After the first few transactions I realized that this must be a group of drug dealers, probably marijuana, but then I really wasn't expert enough that I could discern the difference between marijuana dealers and heroin or cocaine dealers.

The money would always be brought by a single member of this group of four or five people, and after a while I decided that it would be safer to accept the cash only at the bank, where I would deposit it before actually sending the money transfer. The group readily accepted this arrangement, as they (or their leader) understood the danger to which I was exposed when I kept the money in the store and brought it to the bank.

These transactions were very profitable for me, bringing me commissions of $130 to $150 each. There would be three or four transactions each week, and they were a factor in the on-going success of my store. By success I mean the ongoing prevention of failure or bankruptcy.

In time I discerned a pattern. Always there would be a transaction on Monday afternoons. The others would be made irregularly but never on Sundays. After Mondays there would be two or three more. I became very interested in or perhaps intrigued by in the group, and wondered what they were actually doing,--were they wholesalers, what was their product, who was actually in charge, was the person in charge one of the people who brought me money? I wondered.

A time came when I was at Estrella de Ponce a bar on Broadway in Bushwick, at that time one of the seedier parts of Brooklyn, much more so than the part of Williamsburg in which my store was located.

I knew the owners of the bar, as they were my customers at the drug store. Their names were Tonto and Luis, and they were trying to interest me in a real estate deal, which, of course, I passed on; but which, of course, would have made my life much easier to day. Tonto now lives in Sands Point and Luis and his wife live on Riverside Drive. So you can understand what kind of partners I might have had. I led them to my friend Ruben, the architect, but as far as money was concerned, he was already over his head due to his attraction to cunt, cocaine, and cognac, and he passed also. -- Only one of many mistakes for both of us.

While I sat at a table with Tonto and Luis, three members of the group entered the bar. They sat at the bar and ordered tequila, and seemed very happy about something that had occurred that very day. They spoke in Spanish far too quickly for me to understand, but Tonto, a perceptive man if there ever was one, understood that my attention had been diverted, that it had left the table at which I sat, and that I was carefully watching and attuned to the men at the bar.

Tonto cautioned me not to watch so closely. "Why not?" I asked. He explained that they were very dangerous men, that they controlled the neighborhood and that they were not to be toyed with. Two thoughts immediately came to mind. First, that I had nothing to fear from these men, as I was one of them. Second, that my innocent naivete would continue to protect me--as it always had.

In my mind, there was never a question of reporting them. When I began to write to write this piece I described it as a "dilemma" but a dilemma occurs when there are difficult choices to be made. In this case, there were no choices--I knew that I would continue my service to the group.

Should I have used the phrase "my part in the crime," instead of "my service" to the group?