The Art of Tetman Callis

Some of the stories and poems may be inappropriate for persons under 16

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Entries from December 2017

Welcome to the egohood

December 31st, 2017 · No Comments

“The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the psyche, opening into that cosmic night which was the psyche long before there was any ego consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego consciousness may extend . . . . All consciousness separates; but […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Nailing it down

December 30th, 2017 · No Comments

“Wherever the thought of fixity rules, that of all-inclusive unity rules also. The popular philosophy of life is filled with desire to attain such an all-embracing unity, and formal philosophies have been devoted to an intellectual fulfillment of the desire. Consider the place occupied in popular thought by search for the meaning of life and […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

How is it you are

December 29th, 2017 · No Comments

“What is it that has called you so suddenly out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you? The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

What’s the what

December 28th, 2017 · No Comments

“Concepts are functions of the mind, i.e., of individual minds. They may be derived from and signify perceptions of things in the field of space and time; or they may derive from and signify acts of the mind, the minds of thinking individuals; but in no case can they signify entities other than those in […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Not to mention someone who’s full of crap

December 27th, 2017 · No Comments

“Even a little intestinal sluggishness that has become habitual is quite enough to convert a genius into something mediocre.” – Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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Tags: Lit & Crit

They made me

December 26th, 2017 · No Comments

“Who is that ‘other,’ those ‘others,’ to whom I entrust the task of being me? Oh—no specific person! Who is it that says what ‘they say’? Who is the responsible subject of that social saying, the impersonal subject of ‘they say’? Ah—people! And ‘people’ is not this person or that person—‘people’ is always someone else, […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Or you can muddle through without a clue

December 25th, 2017 · No Comments

“Great biographers and novelists have always recognized that, in the lives of people growing up, initiations transpire through the revelations of chance, according to the readiness of the psyche. Beneath the accidental surface effects of this world stir—as of yore—the gods. Their ageless order of the archetypes of myth, ‘the grave and constant in human […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Get to work

December 24th, 2017 · No Comments

“A life—a life with substance—has to be earned and fashioned from within, not received from the world as a gift.” – Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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Tags: Economics · Lit & Crit

Another way of looking at it

December 23rd, 2017 · No Comments

“Shame brings honor. Shame is the crown of the soul and a sense of shame the highest virtue.” – Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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Tags: Lit & Crit · Politics & Law

In case you’ve been wondering

December 22nd, 2017 · No Comments

“Behind every rich man stands a devil, and behind every poor man two.” – Carl G. Jung, The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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Tags: Economics · Lit & Crit · Politics & Law

So get over it already

December 21st, 2017 · No Comments

“Protestant versions of the Christian faith tend to lean more heavily than the Catholic on the family-cult theology of the Old Testament, which when seriously considered as an appropriate base for a proper world religion is constitutionally ineligible, since it is finally but the overinterpreted parochial history and manufactured genealogy of a single sub-race of […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit · Politics & Law

Make it so

December 20th, 2017 · No Comments

“No experience is more likely to put politics out of mind, more thoroughly prove it irrelevant, and better teach how to forget it, than the experience, through art, of what is everlasting in man. And at a time when world political events of truly fearful force are involving all that is in us of individual […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit · Politics & Law

There are no political solutions, only political problems

December 19th, 2017 · No Comments

“Politics I hate, and the belief in politics, because it makes people arrogant, doctrinaire, harsh, and inhuman. I do not believe in the formulae of the anthill, the human beehive; do not believe in the république démocratique, sociale et universelle; do not believe that mankind was made for what is being called ‘happiness,’ or that […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit · Politics & Law

It’s right here

December 18th, 2017 · No Comments

“The substance that harbors the divine secret is everywhere, including the human body. It can be had for the asking and can be found anywhere.” – Carl Gustav Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (trans. R. F. C. Hull) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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Tags: Lit & Crit

The gradations

December 17th, 2017 · No Comments

“The best things cannot be told, the second best are misunderstood. After that comes civilized conversation; after that, mass indoctrination; after that, intercultural exchange.” – Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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Tags: Lit & Crit

The fire this time

December 16th, 2017 · No Comments

“Well I know this, and anyone who’s ever tried to live knows this, that what you say about somebody else, anybody else, reveals you. What I think of you as being is dictated by my own necessity, my own psychology, my own fears and desires. I’m not describing you when I talk about you, I’m […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit · Politics & Law

Zero-sum and not a game

December 15th, 2017 · No Comments

“The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe […]

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Tags: Politics & Law

We’ll even take a cheetoh benito

December 14th, 2017 · No Comments

“Totalitarianism begins in contempt for what you have. The second step is the notion: ‘Things must change—no matter how, Anything is better than what we have.’ Totalitarian rulers organize this kind of mass sentiment, and by organizing it articulate it, and by articulating it make the people somehow love it. . . . Totalitarianism appeals […]

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Tags: Politics & Law

Spatiotemporal extensions in the sea of being

December 13th, 2017 · No Comments

“Since every sight, sound, smell, taste, and tactile impression necessarily comes to us from some part of space and endures for some period of time, space and time, consequently, are the ineluctable preconditions of all outward experience whatsoever: we have our being in their ambience, as fish in water, and what any state of being […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

Now we know so much better, don’t we

December 12th, 2017 · No Comments

“Hard by the Cathedral were the gallows and the wheel. Every man lived in those days in the consciousness of an immense danger, and it was hell, not the hangman, that he feared. Unnumbered thousands of witches genuinely imagined themselves to be so; they denounced themselves, prayed for absolution, and in pure love of truth […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit · Politics & Law

Your money is no good here

December 11th, 2017 · No Comments

“Civilization, seriously regarded, cannot be described in economic terms. In their peak periods civilizations are mythologically inspired, like youth. Early arts are not, like late, the mere secondary concerns of a people devoted first to economics, politics, comfort, and then, in their leisure time, to aesthetic enjoyment. On the contrary, economics, politics, and even war […]

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Tags: Economics · Lit & Crit · Politics & Law

What it is

December 10th, 2017 · No Comments

“Love’s service is without eyes, and love is without fear.” – Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan und Isold Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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Tags: Lit & Crit · Verandah

Rutting of a sort

December 9th, 2017 · No Comments

“The experiences and illuminations of childhood and early youth become in later life the types, standards and patterns of all subsequent knowledge and experience, or as it were, the categories according to which all later things are classified—not always consciously, however. And so it is that in our childhood years the foundation is laid of […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

We, the people

December 8th, 2017 · No Comments

“Every child is born with a certain balance of faculties, aptitudes, inclinations, and instinctive leanings. In no two is the balance alike, and each different brain has to deal with a different tide of experience. I marvel, then, not that one man should disagree with another concerning the ultimate realities of life, but that so […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit · Politics & Law

Getting there

December 7th, 2017 · No Comments

“In the recent past it may have been possible for intelligent men of good will honestly to believe that their own society (whatever it happened to be) was the only good, that beyond its bounds were the enemies of God, and that they were called upon, consequently, to project the principle of hatred outward on […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit · Politics & Law

We make ’em up as we go along

December 6th, 2017 · No Comments

“The older mythic orders gave authority to their symbols by attributing them to gods, to culture heroes, or to some such high impersonal force as the order of the universe; and the image of society itself, thus linked to the greater image of nature, became a vessel of religious awe. Today we know, for the […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit · Politics & Law

Some do

December 5th, 2017 · No Comments

“No one of adult mind today would turn to the Book of Genesis to learn of the origins of the earth, the plants, the beasts, and man. There was no flood, no tower of Babel, no first couple in paradise, and between the first known appearance of men on earth and the first buildings of […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit

You would think

December 4th, 2017 · No Comments

“The ultimate success of all government is dependent upon the proper management of human susceptibilities rather than upon the faithful obeisance to preconceived theories and images.” – Adda B. Bozeman, Politics and Culture in International History Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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Tags: Politics & Law

So be careful

December 3rd, 2017 · No Comments

“A master is not justified in putting his tow to every test which she will survive, if she be fit. There is a zone in which proper caution will avoid putting her capacity to the proof; a coefficient of prudence that he should not disregard.” – Judge Learned Hand, The T. J. Hooper, Circuit Court […]

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Tags: Politics & Law · The American Constitution

And then it starts all over again

December 2nd, 2017 · No Comments

“Without arguing the point as to whether a state can survive without compelling its subjects to accept as Absolute Truth whatever system of belief the dominant elite may have decided to put forth as divine revelation, we shall observe . . . that gods suppressed become demons; which is to say, that psychological and sociological […]

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Tags: Lit & Crit · Politics & Law