April 1. A great bit from an incredible book that I still haven't finished, James Dickey's Alnilam, describing the flow state in terms of the swinging of a monkey:
Whatever the gibbon has got hold of is already something else; it's the next thing he's going to have hold of. The present thing is not being replaced by the next thing he's going to catch; it already is the next thing, and the next thing after that is already coming into place, coming at him, coming to him. There's no way that it can't come, or that he would miss it. His catching it is not only built into his body and his rhythm, but it's built into the branch or the limb or the part of a wall that he takes into the rhythm. His whole environment gives itself to him in the rhythm, it flows around him, everything is linked, everything is together for him, and is part of his motion, it's all flow and it's all him, as long as he keeps it up.
April 14. Long Reddit thread about Trump as the Antichrist. I have relatives who are devout Catholics, and decent people, who are now deciding whether to support the most flagrantly immoral person in the world against the Pope. It's so weird. Someday when this is over, I hope some recovered Trumpers write books and explain what was going on in their heads, because I don't get it. I tend to see it as an act of sorcery, a magic spell that operates on levels unrecognized by science.
But I do have a theory, and it's based on a counter-intuitive observation of who does not see Trump as the Antichrist: Biblical literalists. To me the Bible is an interesting book with some good stuff and some dumb stuff. I don't think that anything is true just because it's in there. Trump is the Antichrist in a metaphorical or allegorical sense, or at most archetypal. The author of Revelations was not God but a talented human who tuned in so deeply to human wickedness that he had some uncannily accurate hits on how it would manifest thousands of years in the future. Jesus is not going to return in any kind of obvious way, but maybe humans in general will become more Jesus-like, and the Kingdom of Heaven is a potential human society that embodies the Beatitudes.
Fundamentalists don't know how to think this way, and this incapacity is not normal religious thinking -- it's unusual. This article, The Great Myths 11: Biblical Literalism, explains how ancient and medieval thinkers were perfectly capable of seeing religious texts as allegory. Modern humans have acquired a cognitive weakness, I don't know how, that makes them highly susceptible to absolutism. That's how Trump gets his followers, by performing a primal confidence that is irresistible to people with flattened cognition. There's something about his way of being that they get pulled into and can't get out of. It reminds me of a line from Genesis -- not the book but the band: "Look into my mouth he cries. And all the children lost down many paths, I bet my life you'll walk inside."
April 16. I think the eventual books by recovered Trumpers will not satisfy me. There are already books by people who have escaped cults. They say they were put in a bubble, where they only saw information that fit the cult's beliefs. People will look back and blame social media, websites designed to maximize clicks by feeding back more of whatever we already think. But it's obvious to me that there's something else going on, something sub-rational.
What I really want, and will not get, is an explanation of charisma. I suppose, in the same way that you can be colorblind or face-blind, I'm charisma blind. Everyone says that JD Vance lacks Trump's charisma, but all I see are different personalities and no glow from either one. Also, what's the deal with Michael Jackson? In terms of record sales and airplay, he was on about the same level as Hall and Oates. Why didn't people get all culty about Hall and Oates in the same way? Was it the moonwalk? Will science discover that certain people are able to modulate their voice at 613.5 Hz which resonates with the temporal lobe to induce a suggestible trance state? I doubt it. It's more like the physical world is an illusion and waves are surging on the level of pure mind.