Barber Perfect is höt. His short blond hair bristles. The solid Teutonic chin stiffens like a bird-dog at the point. He's into a racist rant and his left index finger is punching at the air as he punctuates his spiel with his coda: "He called a spade a spade!" Slag and I try to calm him and deflect him from his knee jerk Blut und Ehre tirade about mudpuppies & the halcyon days of the Hitler-Jugend. He's screaming about the Inquisitional atmosphere which surrounds the firing of James Watson the Nobel Laureate. Watson shared the 1953 prize in Chemistry with Francis Crick his cohort in screwing Rosalind Franklin out of her research as well as her share in the prize. They got the Nobel for first describing the double-helix structure of DNA. A discovery of Form with infinite dimensions in culture as well as science. Watson was canned because he went sub divo with the dirty little secret which dare not be named. He claimed that the intellectual capacities of the different "races" were - in fact - different. Never mind that he's smart enough to know that in science there is no such measurable thing as Race. His claim was that black students did not do as well as white students on standardized IQ tests and other devices which sifted our Cortical capacities. He was talking to an audience of academics and he challenged them to examine their own evidence from their own classes.
Two black "Television Journalists" from CNN went apoplectic On Air. The Media - generally - on both sides of the Atlantic rushed to brand the idea as well as the man as Racist. What Watson actually said was this: "There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so." Every thing that we know about the dynamics of Evolution and the effects of Environment as a Selective Agent underscore the Truth of that statement. So Barber had a point to his bile. Watson said nothing that most academics have not "silently" noticed. As Barber - quivering with Aryan hubris - put it: "Your Chink, your Nip, even your Gook, outscores Whitey. Und all of them outscore your Nigga'!" Barber will explain that if you say Nigga' and not Nigger then that is colloquial and not racist. Slag and I disagree. "Actions are judged on their moral dimension by their intent," Slag told him. We were having morning coffee in Skippy and Slag's shared office in the windowless basement of the Communications Division Building on the campus of the Great University which employs them. Barber Perfect was In-Country to "tzee about mein holdings," and had made the trip north from Chicago to meet with us.

The office was large - over 3 times the space which the University was dolling out for offices - but it was in the basement and in the dark and none of the other Full Professors with seniority wanted it. So Slag and Skippy pimped it out with a long sealskin couch, a CD player, a Coffee-Maker, Coffee and end-tables, throw-rugs, and Track Lighting to illuminate the scores of framed pictures and documents which covered the walls. On the largest wall - over the couch - which would look at home in any New Orleans whorehouse - the lads had hung their framed degrees and honors from their lives in academia. Skippy & Slag have 6 College Degrees between them and both had graduated Magna Cum and had been inducted into Scholastic Honoraries like Phi Beta Kappa. So there was a forest of Auctoritas attesting to their magnitudes & the like. The chairs for the students were arranged right in front of the couch so that when the little darlings came whining into the office to complain about marks and assignments they had to sit and face the Wall of Shame as Slag had dubbed it. It was our way of Silencing them. Balking them back. We would pontificate from the whorehouse couch and they would sit with lowered gazes and expectations. It worked for us.
That's a statue of the god Harpocrates, god of Silence, above; it's by the German artist Wilhelm Beyer [1725-96]. As a god, Harpocrates was from the category of Anthropomorphized Abstractions. Totally amoral, having nothing to do with right and wrong or good & evil and nothing to do with the salvation or fate of humanity. Harpocrates - as a god - is an illustration of a stage in human mental development. Thus he is a concretion in the objective world of an interior mental dynamic in the monkey mind. He is a Kenotic entity. Something which has fallen out into a Form from a way of thinking. In Communications Theory terms: the Intensional become Extensional. As Joe Campbell once described the process: "Facts of the Mind made Manifest in a Fiction of Matter." So, so many of the world's gods have been born this way. Monkeys project - and then they mistake their projections for autonomous beings. So, so many of the gods have been born this way. They die when the Monkey becomes conscious of Projecting and not before. They hang around today as Muses and Mnemonics - tying a knot on one's finger is an attribute of the goddess Mnèmè. Gods are like Media - when they change, the old one becomes ceremonial & decorative, powerless but kicked upstairs to become a Logo, an Abstraction.
That's Hermes as Harpocrates on the stamp above - such is fortuna for even the gods. In the scene Hermes/Harpo plays Psychopomp - a guide for Souls - and leads them on their Return to the Monad. He stands on a Phylactery with a Greek inscription which decoded into Latin goes: "Silentium deum cole - monas manet in se." Decoded into English it goes: "Worship god thru Silence - the Oneness remains in itself." To the left is Artist Rosemary Broton Boyle's 3 Geo Graces - Kenny loves how she Descartesed the concept. The 3 Graces are Euphrosyne (Mirth), Aglaia (Splendor), and Thalia (Good Cheer). Together - not individually - they are the goddesses of Joy, Charm, and Beauty. Touch their Balls for more grace.
The Graces are invoked to run herd on Dances and Feast Banquets which over time was stretched to include any social event with drugs. The 3 were also Sonderkommando and detailed to Attend the higher gods: Aphrodite/Venus and Eros/Cupid. When Venus, the slut, partied with Cupid they were entertained by the 3 Graces and their ancient Doppelgangers the 3 Muses: Aoide (Song/Voice), Melete (practice), and Mneme (Memory). As the Muses they represented the 3 preconditions of Poetic Art as it was used in Cult or "Religious" practice. Together - the 6 that were actually just 3 who were actually just 1 - were the Bitchcraft - the Rock Band - for the gods on Mount Olympus. Apollo was shitkicking on his electric lyre while the 6-3-1 - let's just call them Caniculae - danced wildly and lewdly and led the crowd into frenzy and orgy and finally Kenosis, Catharsis, and Release. Thus Empty you could lose that pesky consciousness of suffering and suffering and pass out on the marble floor. Aglaia wed Hephaestus, the master of the forge, the Craftsman of the gods - so that when Splendor meets Craft we get Art. That's how the Graces got connected with the Arts. That's how the gods fall from mental functions into myths. When Cupid, the god of sex, bribes Harpocrates, the god of Silence, with a Rose - to keep quiet about Venus, goddess of Love, and her wicked, wicked ways . . . that decodes as the Id and the Libido going on a bender but keeping it sub rosa from the Ego and his Super. If you were to wring out the Monkey's mind - all of the gods except the one forming would splash out all over the marble floor. And then you could be damn near empty.
Princesse Tam-Tam as the "muse de l'innocence." Would it be wrong of me to want to ravish innocence? And how innocent can you be pushing a baby carriage in your fuckme clothes? Oh well, Barber Perfect tells me it's Analogy. That it's all Analogy. Except the part that's pure Sign and passes thru us unmediated and therefore never transubstantiated into a god, or a demon, or an art. He's probably right about Jimmy Watson getting screwed by Political Correctness, though. PC is a cancer on thought and as such it too will probably end up a god. But Slag and I feel it's our Duty as Communications Professors to remind everyone - including Barber - that ideas need words to fall out of us and the ones we pick for the task have consequences. If you dress up the unthinkable and the unmentionable you can parade them half-naked but you need caution - Caute - when dressing them down to their little "t"s.
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