Lantern Festival

I have always been doubtful of the criticism about synchretism. Well, not only did I grow up in a highly multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society – there were two people within the household who, originally orphaned after World War II, grew to their teens not knowing that they were in fact full siblings, yet having originally been raised one by a Chinese family, and the other by an Indian family... One spoke only haka, the other mostly only tamil and a little english.

And it was virtually a complete accident that they were employed within the same household too, with my father and mother going through birth and immunisation records with a schooling register that was being formed post-war, from memory I think just to work out what real ages students were, and discovering the facts of the situation when they realised who the actual individuals were these particular details referred to. I won't go into how the matter was eventually revealed to all the people involved, suffice to say it all went extremely well indeed.

The internet is doing one thing very well and that is to underscore that the world of human beings is actually only one world. People today can and do rapidly access information and cultural ideas and aspects from across the entire globe and there will be an inevitable social, cultural, conclusion to that in the future.

Fifteen days after the beginning of the Chinese Lunar New Year, is the lantern festival. I understand this as a Taoist tradition – because that was the predominant Chinese ethnic cultural group dwelling in that part of the world where was raised. I do think in fact, that it is indeed a Taoist tradition fullstop, but of course it has been changed around in varying parts until today, say for example in Singapore, it is quite a bizarre, commercialised, spurious portrayal of something, I'm not sure what, but certainly something the Singapore government feels will appeal to the tourist dollar. Singapore is the very 'least Taoist' place in the world that I can think of!

Synchretism is one thing, but then there is such a thing as simply a bad human, and there is such a thing as a bad type of government or system, or a malicious tyrannical dictatorship- these things are not about differences of philosophy; they are about evil motivations and corrupt and evil motives. Whether they are disguised or rationalised spuriously, or whether they are open and obvious, it is possible to detect the difference between what are merely distant philosophies, and otherwise simply narrow-minded, single-minded, self-aggrandizing and self-important attitudes.

However, just for the moment, I shall focus only on the Lantern Festival, its beauty and its subtletly, and its myserious aspect, which is typical of all things Taoist. On the lanterns, there are meant to be puzzles of various kinds, that you can contemplate and try to solve, as the light breezes touch the swinging brightly-coloured candle-holders... as they slowly sway on long strings in the warm evenings...

Best,
Calvin J. Bear

Fantasy, Gambling, And Fast Money

Listen, the only kind of money you want to concentrate on going after is fast money.

I can't be sure of what type of person reads this but I've made myself a rule not to compromise on my own style and expressing what my innermost thinking is based on what experience has taught me. The fact is I known that many people carry preconceived positions on many things and worse still, there is individual brain psychology going on that manhandles whatever anyone says, not just what I might say.

Jesus Christ said this: the love of money is the root of evil; do not rely on material riches because when they fail you, what will you then do?

Money, you see, in the form of something captured, or kept, or held to you, is static. Meanwhile everything around you moves. Money, and even the value of it, while you're still holding it, can seem to evaporate into thin air because of the scale and rate of external change. If you have a real lot of it (money), do you know that if you stack it, the notes on the bottom can actually wear away over time? There are banks that I have seen in Switzerland and Germany, with special stacking machines made typically in those countries – machines that all they do is stack and re-stack notes to slow down this wearing away process.

Today, you see the mainstream media carrying on about how the IMF(!) is the reason that countries (for instance such as those countries under pressure in the Euro zone right now) can have a viable and valid currency. And that is absolute rubbish.

The only reason you can have a viable and valid currency is that people have a belief in it.

Nobody believes in the IMF except those inside its closed circle of power and who want to preserve its power and position of political influence and I would add, interference.

Consequence: money is evaporating under everybody's nose because the IMF is not imaginative enough to engage people's genuine belief which is starting to move away very fast.

So we have this set of socially common misconceptions about valuable things which includes an aversion to gambling, fast money, and fantasy.

Nonetheless, if Mrs. Georg Philipp Telemann never gambled, and her husband not have felt an obligation to pay her debts, her husband would have written far fewer baroque pieces of music for us to enjoy today. If fantasy were not so powerful, we would not be able to anticipate the sci-fi movie spectacular coming out this year John Carter of Mars, originally written by Edgar Rice Borroughs of Tarzan fame. Fantasy makes Hollywood movies! And lots of money!

Lynn Collins in the new John Carter Of Mars movie

In the search for the real and the substantial, the usual default human position is risk-aversion and what appears to be prudence and restraint. This default position arises from a mental laziness, and a fear, and a group delusion about safety and security. Now my meaning here is that in order to attempt anything with a chance to succeed that involves risk, imagination, unique action, and daring – you have to accept that to possess the skills required and to train for them to function successfully is more elevated a thing than even is in the hands of the people in the IMF right now... So I don't really look down on what I have been calling mental laziness and the fear of failure – that fear is real and a sensible feeling. Jesus Christ, in my own view, did not come to speak to everyone and what he really was saying was directed at the human in its peak potential state. In that state, magical thinking, is both realistic and capable of affecting the external material world. But all that stuff, is not for ordinary people, but extraordinary people.

Best,
Calvin J. Bear

Lace Masks And Ethics

People can get lost in their own sophistication. Have you ever noticed that there are people who will launch themselves into a dissertation on mathematics, or god in relation to mathematics(!), or advanced physics, or some other thing full of special obscure terms and terminologies that no one else in particular really has much firm grasp of – if indeed anyone does at all...

And they do so with verve, mainly because they feel the thrill of having discovered that they have what passes for them as intelligence. And of course intelligence has had such a great reputation in the past in society generally so it's no wonder they feel a thrill.

I suppose intelligence for these people must seem like some kind of a new toy.

I intend to bring the word 'ethical' - believe it or not - into my argument here. The governing spirit of things that are done – the ethos – in our modern times, could easily be simply erraticism. And so, those entangled in their own webs of complicated ideas and who really are simpletons on every other level – can't tie their own shoelaces and so on – may be acting quite ethically, in laying claim to the present-day high ground of the human intellect. : ) They are presenting a true depiction of their ethos!

From where I stand, today there's just too much – too many foolish and thoughtless iterations of someone else's original ideas or innovations – and none of it shows the formal consistency that a genuine form of ethics would donate to a validly intelligent human endeavour.

But one has to be careful to distinguish between outward style as deliberate studied design of a human facade or mask, as opposed to the purely opto-graphical capturing of human form as an aesthetical appreciation. This is the difference between the work of Helmut Newton and say – Ellen von Unwerth (who created the photograph to the right). I don't personally believe Newton wanted to show an appreciation of the human form, as much as he desired to explore an intellectual juxtapositioning of human things but involving the human form and this of course comes across almost always as erotic and sexual style. Von Unwerth, on the other hand, I would say explores a simple direct aesthetic appreciation of the human form as her main photographical subject matter without too much extra symbolic meaning. Her work often appears decadent but why this should be so in the sense of style escapes me. Maybe the human form is decadent!

People who know me know I have a great interest in design – industrial design, commercial design, also design in personal style as typified by the well-known stylists: Panté, Lagerfeld, Armani, and so on.

The intellectual ethics of style – once you disregard the current ADHD-afflicted, erratic mindset – goes like this:

A theme must be consistently carried through across the whole of the subject matter. The lace face-mask is mirrored by the lace-covered high-heeled shoes. This implied intellectual vision of style shows the fabric (lace) as translucent, confidential, ornate yet honest. It reminds us also of the Tao – black and obscure or impenetrable in part and clear and penetrable in another part. The surface and the internal. The front and the rear. Et cetera. It recalls to us the Hermetic Code: 'As above so below.' What we cannot see will be as one with what we can see.

Beneath the skirt we will expect the underwear to be black Chantilly lace, oui? And so too must the wearer themselves also be translucent, confidential, ornate yet honest. This is the meaning of personal ethics in relationships. Of course this is just one example of something where style is consistently expressed. I am not sure that people today quite so deliberately intend to express themselves as definitely as the image example I have just suggested, but the effect is that a personal inner haphazardness still comes across. We cannot escape the meaning of what we look like. Whether we like it or not. Some people think they are being very clever by employing complex facades and calling it style – but old hands see through them very easily.

And Kippers For Breakfast

This week I've been staying at a golf course resort. The course itself was designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr., whom many regard as the world's all-time best golf course architect.

I haven't played golf in recent years myself although at one time I was a good player. I was taught as a teenager by a knowledgeable old Scot and frankly I loved the game and eventually just couldn't abide the great swelling tide of new players who turned up around the late Eighties along with the Japanese money of that era and its interest in brightly-coloured criss-crossed plus-fours and all things Anglo-American.

But every cloud has a silver lining.

The money that swirls around the golfing world nowadays has meant that the hotels attached to most of the top-grade courses lack for nothing.

The standard of service, quality of food, solidity of everything you touched – were all reasons to be extremely cheerful, if not indeed quite joyous, given the miserable day and age in which we live right now. (It's just a stock photo of fruit on the right there - the fruit at the hotel was light years better. I'll take my own pics next time!)

And I take it kippers for breakfast is rather normal for golf resort hotels... It wouldn't be too normal in most Australian households in high summer though let me tell you!

When was the last time I observed as fine an array and selection of fruit, for example, at the breakfast bar? Nope. Can't think of an 'ever before.' And as a good friend of mine noted yesterday, if John says so then it must pretty damned good because he's seen it all before and been there when it was something special. I had to smile when I saw him raise his eyes at my explanation of the extraordinarily high quality of the food.

I guess there may also be some effect coming from the China market commodity boom going on in Australia – particularly in Western Australia - right now...

Frankly I like the prospects for investing in Australia again right now and I haven't felt that way for, what, um, maybe thirty years...?

Let me tell you this much about money: it's pretty dumb stuff. When it's really around in huge chunks it just goes everywhere and anything can make you a profit. It's around in Australia right now. And I don't think its going away any time soon either. People who know me know that in fact most of my money is in South Africa and London, but I still have a few things here in Australia that I never thought would do too much. Wrong!!!!! Just shows ya, don't it; eggs in different baskets and all that.

All the best,

Calvin J. Bear

The Spirit Of Education

I am not an educator. I am an entrepreneur and businessman. My father, on the other hand, who came from a very wealthy family in shipping, tea and banana and pineapple plantations, and eventually oil – was an educator. He gave up the family business to teach english, which he ended up doing for forty years after World War II until he retired.

He claimed the two best writers in the english language were Arthur Quiller-Couch and Joseph Conrad. And he said Conrad demonstrated that people who did not have english as the mother tongue often wrote the language better than native english speakers because they actually tried to follow the rules of grammar. Conrad of course, was not English.

My own view of why my father gave up what was and would have been an incredibly lucrative life, in order to teach people who were pretty impoverished after the war, was very probably due to the life-changing experience the war itself had on him.

Personally I cannot teach and generally I will not try either. People who want to learn and know they need to learn – as may have been true of those who had missed the normal years of senior schooling, but had survived the war – are vastly different from people of the modern era who know everything, have eveything, and are usually seeking only greater access to ever greater material wealth.

The power of real education can certainly gain you material wealth. But the point of it is not that.

Virginia Woolf is a classic case in question. She was born rich, and both vastly more naturally intelligent, as well as stunningly well-educated – but she had no degree and never attended any university. An avant garde personality living in the wrong time, and dying tragically.

(Pic is Tilda Swinton as Woolf's 'Orlando.')

Being educated DOES NOT necessarily mean having a degree. I know it is widely held that being held up to the scrutiny of academic peers, and testing oneself against a benchmark of peer-rated excellence is the philosophy behind the honour and desirability of the modern university education.

And there is also an idea that the best educations develop leaders in various fields. Including, certainly, in professional fields.

At the same time though, happiness itself, for the wise individual, cannot be counterfeited under great swathes of money only... Happiness for a human can only come from the deepest understanding of a very large number and variety of things, including, of oneself as well as of others – and sometimes, nay, I would say often, in order to arrive at such understanding, it is necessary to abandon the mercantile altogether, and what even appears to the less wise, the immediately practical as well, and devote all attention to the important. And what is important? The human spirit is important. The character of a person is important – meaning, as my father would say, it isn't what you look like but the content of your character that counts. It is not whether you won or lost, but how you played the game, as the saying goes. It seems platitudinous but I maintain it to be true.

In order to follow the path of real education, one must hold still against a strong tide. One must discover what is worth fighting for, really worth fighting for; it's about values and having them. So many great and wise people have gone before you, and they have left their writings, and their words and their works. When your heart strings are moved by the legacies of those certain particular human beings who have gone before you, then you have found educators to follow.

And when all others have fallen away, and that paragon leads loftily ever upward even to the very highest reaches, the most difficult of places, the most unhuman and absurd and humanly despised of intellectual concepts, may you still be there, following that star in its own brightest divine firmament against the black and ignorant void of the rest of empty space, the place to which all the merely finite must be consigned eventually. And then you will be happy indeed with your position in the Universe. Knowing more than the merely mortal. And as the Platonists say, befriending the gods themselves.