CONFESSIONS OF THE MANIC-MAD EMPEROR

 Confessions of the Manic-Mad Emperor Hank de-1st

August 15th 1970 , I was as high as a kite on my return walk down Howard Ave in New Haven's Hill Neighborhood nearing the corner of Congress Ave   (note the 'X' on the sw corner).

My brain was in celebration from the subjective perception of the joyous mood that had developed on the street-to the tune of 'Glad' from TRAFFIC's 'John Barleycorn Must Die' . At THAT moment I realized I had engaged a conversation with 'Me', 'Self', and 'I'-all having disagreements with each other. Awareness of this stunned me to the realization that I had gone into multi-polar personality insanity.  I asked myself, "What  can I do?". "Self" responded, "Do what ya gotta do. No time to wait on others to understand or be with you. Go ahead and begin what you must do with or without them.

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(Knowing my status with most of the people I knew,)

The DREAM for the RECORD

foreword

this is being told as an advisory for all those who intend to engage me so that you will know that my latitude of interest is focused on a particular outlook and i have little time for other considerations.

‘The dream’ tells about my relationship to my life and the people in it.

In the early winter of 1971-72 i had a dream that was so symbolic for the time, yet so encompassing of my lifetime going forward to this point that i have considered it my personal prophecy.

the dream begins with me at a chalet during cocktail hour.

The crowd that was there with me i sensed that i had known them or will have known them in my future.  There is the normal chatter that occurs at cocktail parties.

In my boredom i move away from the crowd in the room to take in the view of the scenery surrounding the chalet and the overview which the chalet commanded. as i looked out and down into the valley, i could see the pine and other deciduous trees giving a ‘green cathedral’ sacredness of nature to my view of the valley towards the body of water below. 

On the water, i saw a military cargo ships docking and disembarking troops. the troops were not of our nation’s military. the emblems i saw were foreign. 

i turned and re-entered the room, frantically relaying what i had seen. Because i had been by reputation a notorious, hard-driving-to-obnoxious, maniac of unconventional thoughts and opinions, what i was trying to warn was ignored and discounted. I saw what i saw, and i had done my due diligence to those for whom i had, at the least, an ethical, if not moral duty.

(Besides that, i had separated myself from that room and people because of their shallow-to-mindless banter of posturing, profiling, and signifying for each other with very little of proof-committed substance to their blatherings).

I took off from them to save myself from what was sure to be a capture and slaughter by the ‘enemy’ troops disembarking down by the water.

i entered the woods running as far as i could get from the chalet. i could feel my chest heaving and gasping for breath and my legs laboring in their out of shape status to take me away. the adrenalin of fear gave me the stamina and strength to keep going. shortly into my run i could hear the sounds of heavy vehicles and light, motorcycle-type vehicles coming closer and stopping.

 I heard shouting, shots being fired, screams, then silence. the chalet had been stormed and ‘subdued’. in a bit of paradoxical, laughing regret and cynicism; i thought SARCASTICALLY to myself, ‘there goes ‘the BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST!’. 

i continued to run, hoping i could go further than the troops would be searching. my hopes were in vain. i heard the ignitions of the trucks and light vehicles starting up and some were headed my way. i ran with more urgency, feeling my heart pounding with fear. soon, i heard voices and the barking of dogs. they had picked up my scent. if i could get to a place to get them off my track. no luck. they came upon me and encircled me with vehicles, men, and dogs. i was a goner but was not going to surrender.

I let them approach close enough to be within arms’ length to grab me, but i grabbed one of them and with unknown and unpracticed skill i fended or killed off the troops and dogs in a way bruce lee would smile in envious admiration.   

with this batch dispatched, i returned to my run away from any possible capture.

The trail wound and curved to the edge of a big lake. i was moving along the shoreline looking for a means to cross the lake. 

   

 i heard a rustling of a person approaching along the path to my front. it was a biblical looking person with a look of gravitas on his face. 

     he told me to wait for someone to take me across. i intuitively trusted his words and leaned against a tree and slid down to rest on the ground to take in the lake view.

[end of dream]

the dream as ‘lived’ in my viewing was even more dramatic than my attempts of narration here. i considered it significant and ambiguously symbolic of a projection of my relationships with the mind-sets of the people of new haven connecticut, circa dec. ‘71 to feb. ‘72.  I was incredulous about this exhortation and began what would be my 'kicking and screaming'  

​ of excuses for not committing to it.   

After the Army and seeing such self-absorbed, material disinterest to any of the credo I would be advocating or demonstrating with the people I had encountered, I went along to get along until I had two dreams around 29 years. The first had 'God'

on his throne           on top of the hill at the junction of Harvard Pl & Westmoreland Ave . Even worse, he was peering into my eyes, knowing what jack-off thoughts of dirt-old-man depravity I was thinking! That broke up my sleep.

Soon there after I had the dream of me walking home from work, and I was on my street, Cambridge, and was hearing the news of a Tsunami that had originated of the coast of Japan and was heading to crash into the California coast, making Nevada our west coast  , plus knocking out the electrical grid for the entire country with the subsequent aftershocks.

By the time I reached the house the news was over so I went downtown to the corner of Jefferson and Salina to get a paper from the news stand there.

 I picked up a NY Daily News    and they had made their front page a large font editorial that replaced the normal pic there. The editorial lamented that none of the promotional TV ministers of re-known could do anything to stop the catastrophe just when SOMEONE was needed to intercede with 'God'.

Weeeellllll... Yours and my Hero,' the Man with a Million Moves and not ONE fucking one right', JUST HAPPENED to be the guy, from my past encounters with serendipity and synchronicity. BUT I had been the fuck-off for the past four years since I it seemed there was no interest or urgency by anyone or for me to do more than show up and be alive and materialistically striving everyday. I took that dream as a warning alarm, and I began my path back to where I had been in my studies at Yale   and the related post undergrad experiences.

Four or Five years later a kid called 'Gabe' (Gabriel??) said he had something I might want to read and gave me the paperback edition of the Bhagavad Gita. When I read it and got to the parts on karma yoga (existential duty)  

​ 

and 'individual imperative duty'   .

 

That gave me focus, though I wasn't still convinced. Though in the fall of 1985, my incidental writing during the short stint of my law school brought on the first articulation I would name as the ‘Cosmic Religion’. It was the rhetorical progenitor to this work, in that my orientation was no longer temporally-centered. I saw that I was a conduit for a willful energy source whose agency was manifest by me as a sign of its presence.

In 1996, I wandered down to Corpus Christi TX, merely because the name of the town was translated 'the Body of Christ'. While there I tried to rekindle relations with an old flame from New Haven that went back to that day of the walk towards Howard & Congress Avenues. Having given no thought that she 'had a life' she was living with not a thought for 'the fool believing-me'

I wrote the letter that received a merciless put-down. OFCOURSE, crestfallen to shame I manned-up, took the slap-down stoically to bed and sleep. During the sleep I dreamed I was in a wooded glen sitting on a log when u pops an angel with the face of Carol Camenga. The angel asks me 'How ya doin'?' I shrug my shoulders, nod and say, staring at her, 'I'm OK'. The angel give me an incredulous look and says, 'You men! Always trying to act brave.' She kisses me on the cheek and the dream ends. I marvel at the morale-boosting of that dream and how the mind comes to the aid of the conscious.

WELL.... Later that day I THOUGHT I was supposed to be at a wake. I show up there, but don't see anyone recognizable at this gathering of Mexican Hispanics at a seeming memorial for some tragic death. After searching the INSIDES of the brochure I had picked up and finding no familiar names, I closed the brochure and saw the front of it for the first time        , the image was showing the same juxtaposition that I had with  the angel in the dream the night before. THAT confirmed everything and I was no longer kicking and screaming as I had been doing for the past 26 years.

Other life events had unfolded: the draft, the army, civilian life-military life revolving cycles, end of active duty, end of marriages, black sheepdom-ostracism by family, solitude & renewal, new adventures, new life admonishment, depression attack-then cancer surgery, new renewals, resolution, and adventures, release from military commitment at the attainment of military retirement points, the rhetorical liberation to speak in criticism of the civilian and military leadership, the engaging with the counter-politics who were against the b.s. of the nation’s and the states’ capitals.

There were the continuing timely serendipities and synchronicities of interjections in events, such as dumb misfortunes I had brought on myself, inflicting what would be for others severe employment and income dislocations. For me the serendipitous occurrences provided surreally fortuitous relief from these personal calamities I had created the fulfilling pattern-of-events of ‘the dream’ and its propheticness.

From there I developed by experience and attitude to the 'dark angel' misanthrope   who thinks in terms of cynical Jeremiah lamentations about naivete and populist ignorance, since the Peeps are very much like I was before my reckoning with all myselves on that Saturday of 15 August. The difference between me and most of them, I have entertained the possibility of the improbable as possible and have been open-minded to serendipity and synchronicity to be more that what I had been giving lip-service to being 'Better lucky than morally good'..

I KNOW I'm no more moral than anyone, but I have been damn, fortuitously lucky as far a series of timely engagements with ideas and people showing up..

The idea of ‘this isn’t for me’ or, ‘ohhh, i’ll leave it to the next person or to some divine intercessor’  is not in the cards for me. i am on the hour glass to ‘do what i can do, in the most conscientious (and now efficient) manner possible. don’t excuse me for what i may do towards you but be forewarned if you cross my path, i will cut you no slack for inconsistencies i perceive in your actions to your declarations. like stink or flies on shit, or like white-on-rice: i’ll be at you like grant was to lee-holding the line of conflict until one of our arguments fail us into a submission.

This is prime time, for mature adults only! don’t get pissed. take care of the business of your declarations and assertions, and you’ll be fine with this person ‘on-the-hourglass’.

Joe Harpo, de Emperor  

‘the Being with a million moves and not one fucking one right,

by his own will!

On becoming a cultural heretic

 

Introduction To ‘A sick culture’


Introduction To
‘A sick culture’


Inherent Resistance to being the social dynamics’ Agent

My entire social interaction has been a repulsion to my style, while their style of consensus has proven itself, in aggregate as the mirage forest of platitudes, to be so contradictory and toxic, in comparison to their self-identified benign congeniality.

What was classically thought of as me being an anti-social misfit, has turned-out over the span of history as a demonstration of the neurotic and accumulative societal pathologies of others. Those “pathologies'' were consensually accepted as the contemporaneous ‘standard of behavior’. Yet those benign, to trivially banal social interactions are and have been the accommodating acquiescence. Its orientation to a general, civil vernacular and colloquial of thought, which provides the false narrative of collegiality. That state doesn’t challenge the macro because it would be uncivilly disruptive, yet it would castigate the micro to the proverbial ‘pointing out the tiny mote in the accused eyes while missing the metaphorical blind-spot beam in their own eyes’.

This plays out in both small cliques as well as institutional protocols, in which the pecking order hierarchy, most venal in small cliques and insidiously destructive in the institutional ones, effect the consequences. How it came to this is up to speculation. My own take is that it’s part of the limbic response to “existential threats"-

those that challenge the particulars of individuals' daily operational conceptions to the point that it’s too great a radical change from their status quo that they refuse  the major external accommodation to what has been their status with the group cohesive and adhesive accommodations to those matrixes bonds.

It’s not what I, at the least, did not comprehend until nearly 7 decades into my own life. It took being ‘the iconoclastic’ in grammar school, and the growing recognition by me of being in a social disaffection in junior/middle/high school. I had a beginning self-validation of myself and my ways in college from the demonstrated shallow signifying of others by the preponderance of my peers and the contemporaneous authority figures. In  the military service, the hallmark for me besides the importance of consistent self-discipline, was the abuse of title and authority by those whose titles required them to have a fiduciary duty before their own personal self-interests or aggrandizement. Civilian life was not only more of the same recognized abuses of position and authority, but the banal obedience to protocols that inflicted institutional injustice and perpetuated the individual mindsets of both vapid collegiality as well as cynical opportunism.

What makes this worse, is that these forms exist throughout cultures and societies from the most debased to the most privileged, and across all ethnicities and races. This perception I have makes me wonder, how I could have developed to not being one cohesive or adherent to these noxious mindsets. I came to this conclusion:  The ‘Tabula rasa’ conception

, noted by Aristotle, the Stoics, John Locke, and David Hume was incomplete, due to their era’s ignorance of the fetus in the womb being affected not only by what the bearer ingests, but the external surroundings’ effects, kinetically and psychologically on the bearer of the fetus. With this caveat to the ‘tabula rasa’, the fetus’s advent to this temporal dimension is one of no conscious predispositions except for its physiological sustainment of nutrients and extra-corporeal "psychological nurturing".

For me the incidental postpartum nurturing had the unique feature of being in a non-consciously intentional, cloistered environment. Many of the ways and “rules” of social interaction weren’t experienced, thus they were never learned. The rules of behavior came from my parents and the logic for their rules. That has been and continues to be my underlying foundation for my logic and its rationalizations. 

Reaffirming outside sources from biographies and other media noting the inspirational and the dastardliness of people, their ideas and action gave me an even broader sense of the forms of logic and their unique applications for my analysis of things.

 Whether this was attributable to the coincidences of the uniquely shrewd timing and placement of me along the contemporary historical timeline is equally  and astoundingly improbable.

It would've been similar to me having a predestined commission simultaneous to the coital precipitation of my physical conception. I dunno.

What I do know is my strong affinity to not only the dicta of Genesis 18: 10-30, Job 1: 6-11, Bhagavad Gita 3: 20-26, Futul al Ghaib 27th Discourse, Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Mask; RD Laing’s Politics of Experience and Self and Others, and the most pivotal self indictment, David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney’s The Lonely Crowd. Throw in the corollaries that led to my own improvisations leading to my present character dynamic.

This dynamic has me in the otherwise skeptical-to-cynical mindset of a “grace” of being ‘luckier than deserved’. That “luck” has given me forebodings and deja vus, as well as fortuitous portals of happenstance of  my many times clueless-as-a-naif circumstances. This grace has gotten me through many of an eye-of-a-needle circumstance.

During all those times of unfortunate or zealous attitudes by me, it’s never been attributed as being favorable to me because of my relative or comparative ‘goodness’. Perhaps, for my honest earnestness that may have been the only quality for such facilitating redemptions.

Because of the beneficence of that grace, I feel an obligation to pay-it-forward. I have been getting better at ‘paying it forward’ as I acknowledged the more substantial rewards of being a tribune for an inquisitive earnest honesty, than aligning in cohesive conformity or slavish adherence to whatever is the temporal norm of the era. 

Being a celebrant of the moment's possibilities, than some pro forma conformist gestures  and signification of the social or cultural order has also made me more prudent of the focus to where I extend my energies. The consequence  of that has developed me as more monastic

, if not less gregarious, when the opportunities present themselves.

The reason for my more monastic approach is because of the odiousness of the metastatic sickness spreading itself in all the dimensional depths of this culture.

That 'sickness' marginalized, then disaffected and estranged me to their proscribed attitudes and "necessary" behaviors. Those attitudes and behaviors have led me in reaction to a discipline that gave me a greater appreciation of the elegant consummation of the basic mechanics necessity for my sustaining operations. 

Those sustained operations, being the primary and imperative priority of focus, allowed for an inner-neural 'RAM-space'.

That extra-'RAM' allowed for a neurally more tranquil disposition to receive or attend to the more subtle signal phenomena, that I'd have otherwise associated with the background and foreground social noise. This "noise" became a collection of aggregated phenomena that spoke of dimensions of meaning discounted and dismissed by pedestrian mundanity. 

It WAS the pedestrian mundanity that needed to be dismissed and discounted. The sublime, subtle phenomena provided the anecdotal testimony and evidence for the dismissal and discounting of mundanity's standards. The anecdotal reason for this conclusion will be the subject of the elaboration of this theme, ‘A Sick Culture’.

Eliminating the noise: PHENOMENAL CASTE LEVEL EXPERIENCE

                                        PHENOMENAL CASTE LEVEL EXPERIENCE

It's the level of comprehension of signals received that's dependent on the mindset of apprehension. The level of existence you have found yourself: as a pawn of others narratives; as a spin doctor seeking pawns; or your own rules of definition. They determine what you will apprehend and comprehend. They are tales of illusion of delusion from the mind being played by others, consciously; your experience, incidentally; or from your own neurotic psychoses.

Time's passage is the 'grand determinant' for what psycho-social category we've selected for ourselves. I can testify that my own "designation" came from a most round-about and contorted series of paths for which  plans-made would have sent me  only to some algorithmic, programmed mindsets validated by the smugness of herd consensual surroundings. Mine was an interplay of emotionally impressionable interactions that precipitated insightful perspectives which changed the interpretive perception of the signals encountered in my cognitive field. 

The details are apocryphally anecdotal and good for character count padding found with 'published works'. I can best describe the phenomena as consciousness molding. It started randomly, and as the random anecdotals aggregated to to a quantity which revealed patterns,  I apprehended threads of meaning. Those meanings brought me back to a misgiving I had as a child regarding the path of human social logic. It was a gut reaction, then. As years and the decades passed the observed and learned-of documented contradictions, paradoxes, and inconsistencies made me less reliant on the promotion and advocacy of the social order in place and open to other "assertions".

Those 'assertions' came in the form of the surreal and the incredulously marvelous. Those events made an indelible impression upon me for their symbolic advent as well as their practical fortuity for me in the moment. When it came to a critical head on Saturday, August 15th 1970 in the form of an exhortation to 'Do what I gotta do', I intuitively knew its implication would be shredding the basis on which my social (and holistic) focus had been based. 

It was only as circumstances limited my interaction with the general social dynamic that the resulting latitude in my solitude allowed for the freed mind space to entertain signals other than the narratives being propagated in the media and the pedestrian space. I acquired greater respect for the survivalist and their reclusive self-reliant creeds. Yet, I wasn't satisfied to JUST BE existing in the absence-of-noise. I knew there was some phenomena 'out there' that was implying another dimension of existence and consciousness. That consciousness was not bound by the temporal paradigms and protocols of cultural history and contemporary (trendy) traditions.

In shredding the basis on which my world view operated, the more incidental emotional and intellectual space of detachment and estrangement from the  immediate social bonds and their cultural obeisance was the emotional shock to my hormonal system. That hormonal system controlled my physiological response to the discernable changes and adjustments I had to make physically in my socially obligatory and discretionary navigations of the day. Doing that  altered my mechanical mental gymnastics and the over-all consciousness that rationalized that navigation. 

I was noticing the ever increasing disparate and comparative contrast between myself and others which declared for me that there was a subjectively unique perspective in which I was engaging. I knew the immediate compulsions for that behavior, but I hadn't defined for myself the path to the even more important goal, purpose and meaningfulness of that path.

As time passed, it was becoming clearer that an other human-agent or agents would not be the solution. The limitations for ANY one person to: 1-have that resonating intensity and 2-have the symmetry in intentions with me was not a practical or feasible expectations. This precluded, except for an improbable lottery winning probability

, that an acutely provocative source would be the 'answer to all my    angsts soul-mate'. As this became more decidedly clear, rather than accept the accommodation with the mundane imperfect, I made myself the contrarian  antagonist, de facto enemy of the consensus of temporal 'good'.

In that self-inflicted social banishment and exile from the social graces of my contemporaries

, I was left figuratively and literally with my dreams and their surprisingly subtle insights. As much as the acculturation and indoctrination of institutional and informal education influenced my perception and the derived  thinking, so I found in the dreams the analogies, metaphors, and explicit didactics which temporal experience had been as my instructor.

The dynamics of that revealed to me that 'reality' is found simultaneously in many different dimensions of space in the past-present-and-future. Most contemporary folks live for the reality of the present based on the rationales of the narrative manipulated past. Sometimes those manipulations are done from acute  provincialistic bias of the cultural history of the space. That cultural history for  them is sincerely accepted as the true purpose of the stated "facts", if not the actual facts, per se. Then there are those who cynically use others sincere belief as widgets  to spin a yarn of the reality they prefer that others believe,  for some abstractly anointed 'good for all'. Then there are the indifferent to 'the facts' but have ala carte agnostic use of some those 'facts' that are useful to them.

This next group that is nihilistic toward 'the facts' and anarchic attitudes and actions to either of the formerly stated orders of 'reality'.

I see reality as an ever-changing and evolving consciousness from temporal and  extra-temporal dimensions

. Temporally, we are mobile, tangible, sensory modules. Our sensate capacities allow us to receive signals. Due to historically expedient  needs, certain signals had gained greater importance and priority for their  immediate utility. That utility hasn't remained constant. The perceived increased dependency of need came from the over dependence of 'treating every problem as a nail, as if a hammer was the best expeditious means' than other options requiring a mindset that had yet to be developed to the point of utilizable appreciation.

Beyond the temporal and tangible sensory apprehended tools of conception there were more subtle and abstract tools of use. It is here where dreams provide the hints and clues of analogies, surrogates, and metaphors for the individual. In that space of detached estrangement one can see one's own mini-dramas by the cryptic analogies, surrogates, and metaphors presented in dreams so graphic that they could be holograms. Those 'holograms', set in the past, present, and future, are presentations of your own self, mostly [though other individual characters can be shown, absent your non-dream sentimental bias for-or-against them]

. 

Learning from the aggregation of these dreams over time has not only been a  curated, insightful knowledge experience, but a circumstantial fortuity of mentoring grace for me. I can only speculate that the fabricated ideations made by my subconscious for my dream protagonists are that each has their own energy. When I am in that frequency of resonance with whatever matching energy, it's as   much as the Earth's magnetic field shields its from minor extra-terrestrial disruptors, shields 'my worldly operations' from the worldly based madness of 'off-the-chain' caste operatives. 

My monastic detachment and estrangement from their principalities and domains allows me the piece of peace to  have my mind recreate unconsciously and subconsciously in the relative drama-free dimension of Self. It's in our neurotically, self-comprehend apprehension and perceptual interpretations of our mind's phenomena generated snapshot reports of our emotional perspective of the world which allow us the incidental appreciation of the dimensions that co-exist with our pedestrian temporality

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