Description
The Paros Commune of 1971 to 2021 & Beyond: Jubilee Imagings of Soul and Community
As I recount in the description of the shorter version of this tome, the first part of this book was written and left unpublished before the majority of human beings on this planet were inhabiting their current bodies. I was heavily influenced by the writing of Richard Brautigan at the time, whom I very much enjoyed reading. But then I had heard that he committed suicide shortly after his commercial success, so I decided not to pursue a creative writing career at that time.
I wrote this in 1973, more or less as my friends and I experienced it in Greece, on the island of Paros, in the Aegean, somewhere on the great circle of history running through the Sorbonne from Europe to the US and back again, charted sometime between March of 1871 and now, during which time we all got together in a ski cottage in Vermont and read the work. Then I put it on a shelf, unpublished. So I am still alive.
In the middle of the insanity of Covid while working on this website, I dusted off the Paros manuscript, reflected on my fifty years since then, and added some thoughts on the nature of Soul and Community. In the process of realizing I am older than maybe 97% to even 99% of the people now alive on this planet, I decided to add some additional wisdom for those who might be listening. I realized that just about everything in life comes down to three or four essential truths—1) some things we observe never change despite our best intentions, 2) some things are always changing because of our best intentions but not necessarily as we intended, 3) our best intentions form any number of ways of recognizing the intentions in the rest of Life as to what causes some of those intentions to succeed and some to fail, and finally, 4) we never stop trying to figure this out by clearly imaging such intentions as enhancing success and mitigating failure, as proved by the fact that you are still alive to read this, until we finally succeed, in the spirit of Alfred E. Newman, to stop worrying about it.
That way of thinking is embodied in the final four chapters of this extended work consisting of three contemplations and one communion on the Essential Trigon in 42 diagrams, through experience of the inertial capacity of material nature as found in Marx & others, the intentional capacity of spiritual nature as found in Christ & others, and the formal capacity of ideal nature as found in Plato & others, and finally in the divine comedic imaging capacity of the soul nature as found in my good friend J.C. of Paros Commune fame, Alfred E. Newman, & others.
Thanks a lot, J.C., for setting such a fine example.