The ESP and HH projects stand at nearly 100,000 words. This is my effort to condense and combine the projects into 2,000 words — Synopsis: Modernity is the left hemisphere gone wild. Gnosticism, with its dualistic approach and emphasis on knowledge that gives salvation and control, is a left-hemispheric political religion that thrived during the twentieth century and has today settled in as the dominant cultural disposition that drives public debate. Today’s powerful elites…

Kerouac rejected The Great Rejection — He sat on his mother’s couch, smoking marijuana and watching the McCarthy hearings, cheering Tail Gunner Joe. He was 32 and it was 1954. In his 20s and the 1940s, he said he’d like to join his Russian comrades and fight against Fascism. He coined the term “Beat Generation” which…

My daughter runs. She runs in the morning, she runs at night. Runs, runs, runs. People around town see her and go, “Look at that girl! She’s a runner.” But I know she’s more than that. My daughter breathes. She breathes in the morning, she breathes at night. Breathes, breathes…

He approached his philosophy of the absurd with the left hemisphere rationalist approach, but at least he recognized the rationalist’s problem. — If Jean-Paul Sartre was wildly popular, his younger friend, Albert Camus, was wildly cool. Sartre was ugly; Camus, handsome. Sartre loved women; women loved Camus. Sartre was kind of a dick. Camus was cool. And though Sartre’s writings were hugely popular immediately after World War II, they were soon eclipsed…

If modernity is the left hemisphere’s creation, then pursuits that appeal to the right hemisphere, or require us to give primacy to the right hemisphere, are acts of rebellion against modernity. Example 1: Prose is the left hemisphere’s flex: the earliest written records are from bureaucrats. Poetry is the right hemisphere’s pursuit. Therefore, the poet is a rebel. Example 2: Rhythm is the only element of music that is strongest in the left hemisphere. All other aspects of music thrive in…

One’s hanging wonderfully focuses the mind. One’s hangover wonderfully un-focuses it. Such is my morning, the symbolic first day of summer. It’s not a bad hangover, but the minor headache and grogginess make deep work impractical, so I find myself looking at a new thing in my library: an antique…

September, 1945. Paris. Jean-Paul Sartre and his friends started a new journal, The Modern Times, which challenged writers to commit to action. Shortly later, Sarte was scheduled to give a public lecture. The lecture wasn’t well advertised and Sartre was a dry academic, but when he arrived, the place was…

Samuel Johnson put London and life itself on the same platform, writing: When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life. I often think the same thing can be said of New York City. It, at least, seems that way to me, a foreigner vis-a-vis NYC. …

I guess this piece by Alex Murrell has been making its rounds. The collages are remarkable. Everything, Murrell observes, looks the same these days. It’s nice stuff, but that’s all it is: nice. Things aren’t unique. The essay prompted the Ghost blog team to send a newsletter last week, speculating…