Welcome to day three of a daily email rewrite experiment.
To quote from day 1 “Every day for the next week I will send out a daily email. Then the following week, every day I will send a rewrite of the email from 7 days ago. I am not sure how long I will do this… I’m going to try for a month.”
I kept changing my mind about what I wanted to write about today. First I thought about justice. One of the communities I participated in had a presentation from legal scholar Sari Kisilevsky around the Ethics of Punishment and Mass Incarceration.
In the United States, punishment (via mass incarceration) is completely disconnected from justice - it is unjust. One major issue is the bail system. If all people awaiting trial could make bail then there would not be enough courts to hear all the cases and the US legal system would collapse. It is unjust to force people to plea bargain because they cannot afford to make bail. I first learned about this issue a few years ago via The New Inquiry’s Bail Bloc cryptocurrency project, which lets you mine the cryptocurrency Monero and contribute it to a bail fund. Here are some bail funds to donate to.
Here we have Anubis, the Jackal headed God weighing a human heart against a feather. If the heart weighs the same as the feather, the human may pass to the afterlife, otherwise the human is eaten by that dog/crocodile creature. Thoth, the god with the bird head, is the scribe of the gods that records the results. The scales either are Maat, or Maat owns the scales … there is a little head on the scales maybe that is Maat. Justice is often personified, I find. This image is from the wikipedia entry on the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Then, of course, I thought of Sun Ra, because its Saturday and Sun Ra is from Saturn, and…. Egypt. I just want to have a little fun is all.
One of my favorite pieces by Sun Ra is “The Perfect Man.” The K-Pop group BTS also has a song called The Perfect Man, I don’t think it is related to Sun Ra’s version, but their performance is fun to watch.
I am fascinated by K-Pop especially with the recent political action by K-Pop stans (ie fans), coordinated on TikTok, to disrupt a Trump rally a month ago. I asked various communities I participated in to explain this to me, the how K-Pop is politicized, what is the phenomenon of K-Pop, TikTok (and lip syncing), maybe I will include these findings in my rewrite. BTS is also into Jung, and one analysis could read each member of the K-Pop group as expressing a particular persona. This in and of itself is not a new boy band phenomena, but perhaps it is more intentional and refined in K-Pop.
I’ll just leave you will an image from the Louvre’s website where the Stele of Hammurabi sits. That is probably one of the oldest legal record. What is a Babylonian artifact doing in France? Is that just?
In The Structure of World History by Karatani Kojin, Kojin mentions that law codes arose as a way to enforce norms across communities. Within one community, perhaps there was no need for laws everyone knew how to act and relationship were nuanced and qualitative, the consequence of breaking a rule (or breaking with tradition) was ostracism (ie death). But when different communities come together, with different conventions and no deep relationships perhaps it is important to have a standard set of rules that can bind the different groups together.
Right now, as I have been writing, I am part of a number of different communities. I am also actively interested in the process of cultivating community and structuring community. I have never been interested in this before COVID. I suppose my inability to just chat with people on the street in New York City has made me realize how much I miss community and how much attention aught to be paid to group dynamics.
A friend of mine is interested in the thinker Emanuel Swedenborg, and together we read a commentary on esoteric Islam and Swedenborg by the scholar Henry Corbin (also a Jungian I think - this Jungian name dropping is all coincidental, or some might say synchronistic).
Corbin keeps mentions communities and the community that one associates with, such as communities of mystics or angels. Communities are treated as individuals, for example a community of angels is treated as one organism. I suppose this could be interpreted as something like a superorganism or new type of individual. I do find this emphasis on community thought provoking this emphasis on community. I suppose that is one of the pillars of organized religion in general.
I just found this exercise for kids that looks at different paintings around the theme of community. This great communal meal scene is from Pieter Bruegel, The Peasant Wedding, 1567.
I suppose even reading this newsletter or participating in this experiment there is a kind of community.
Thanks for reading!
x
Meredith