My Esterbrook

The Esterbrook Pen Company was founded in 1858. It was the sole pen manufacturer in the United States. It began with the sale of nibs (steel pen points one dipped in ink). With the development of the true “fountain” pen (ink carried in the barrel housing that flowed through the pen point), the company reached its zenith in producing 600,000 pens a day. In 1967, the company added the Venus Pencil line. The company went bankrupt in 1971, as fountain pens finally gave way to ballpoint pens. Surprisingly, Esterbrook was resurrected in 2014, and is enjoying a comeback of the original pen design.

Below is a picture of my Esterbrook fountain pen which I received from my parents as a graduation gift from high school in 1956. It is sitting atop my “new” Olympia 256 portable typewriter, which is a 1956 model, exactly like the one I also received at the same time as my Esterbrook, but which I had let go when electrics came along. So, they are together once again. I have written with my Esterbrook now for nearly 62 pears! I write with it every day. I still marvel at the phenomenon of thoughts becoming words on the page through the hand and this “instrument of ink.” There is something in this experience that is different than computer keyboards producing thoughts on the screen. It has something to do with intimacy.

COMING SOON…a most important work of interest to all practitioners, seekers and those involved in the psychological and psychiatric healing arts: WHILE PSYCHIATRY SLEPT: Reawakening the Imagination in Therapy, by Dr. George Mecouch, psychiatrist, with Foreword by Jungian Analyst Russell A. Lockhart, Ph. D., will be published on May 1, 2018. Pre-orders will be available on Amazon in April. Highly recommended by Thomas Moore (“Beautiful, original, daring”), Amy and Arnold Mindell (“Mecouch envisions a new future for psychiatry”), and Will Hall (“A vital antidote to our era’s debilitating epidemic of ‘evidence-based’ medicine”), host of KBOO-FM’s Madness Radio.

Lockhart writes in his Foreword:

"It may be too much to expect older practitioners to open themselves to change. Like the old church fathers, they will not look through the Galilean telescope that story-mind makes possible. Most everything animates against it. But for the newer and younger practitioner, those not yet straight-jacketed in the certainties of dogma, those still open to risk, these stories of the art of healing may catch hold of the mind and heart, and open up possibilities for creating new and unexpected modes of working in the future."

One of the most important factors operating within the parasitic dynamic controlling most everything, can be characterized as money trumps lives. This factor is operating at all levels, from the highest government offices to the lowest street machinations, and not just in the United States, but throughout the world. This, of course, has been true throughout history, but what we are seeing now is an exponential spread and speedup of this process that has now become more and more visible, blatant, and viral.

I see little on the horizon that will lead to enantiodromiac change except through catastrophic collapse: economic, political, social, climate, pandemic, and the unknown and unimagined.

Keep in mind and use “money trumps lives” as a filter for seeing clearly into what is happening in the world today, at all levels, in all issues.

In paraphrasing Rebecca Solnit's important book, Paradise Built in Hell (2009), Monica Byrne writes, "we have it all backwards: the society we currently live in is the catastrophe, and going through a natural disaster gives us the opportunity to wake up from the spell. Natural disasters will breed opportunities not yet imagined. The fictive impulse of possible futures is why artists will become the natural leaders. Byrne and Solnit are making important observations and well worth your attention.

Instructions for the Age of Emergency.

Materialism has long held sway in science and technology, but new developments are proceeding rapidly in what may be described as the "replacement" of materialism with something quite different. The implications for the psyche are profound and I'll elaborate on this theme in a subsequent blog post. For now, Philip Goff's review of the situation and new developments will serve as a background.

Here is the link: https://aeon.co/essays/cosmopsychism-explains-why-the-universe-is-fine-tuned-for-life

The PPT in action (Plunge Protection Team)...

In January, the US equity markets generated four Hindenburg Omen signals. These signals have always preceded market crashes usually rated in severity as 5%, 10%, 15% and 20% or more declines from a recent peak. At today’s low (YM 23,088), the market has declined 13.5% from the peak on January 29, a significant “crash.”

The PPT (“plunge protection team”), was formed in response to the 1987 “Black Monday” stock market crash which took out 25% of market equity in one trading session. The PPT was created to make financial and economic recommendations to various sectors of the economy in times of economic turbulence. They were also authorized to do what was necessary to prevent any major crash, such as the 1987 crash. The team consists of the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, the Chairman of the SEC and the Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. They report only to the President and no records of any kind are kept of what they do. They work only with the largest banks and through these entities can order buying in futures, derivatives, and other forms of potential market lifting mechanisms.

President Reagan formed the PPT in 1987 with the idea of “preventing” severe market crashes widely feared as potential triggers for collapsing the general economy. The dot.com crash illustrated the first time that the PPT was powerless in the face of overwhelming selling world-wide. Moreover, the dot.com crash was the first market crash featuring unrelenting selling by computer-controlled algorithms. The 2008 crash, not only involved even greater computer trading, but also a massive overhead of derivatives in degrees that could not be controlled by the PPT. Only the Fed’s insertion of four trillion dollars of buying stemmed the tide and turned the markets positive again. While the markets recovered, it took many years for the economy to recover from the crash, not only in markets, but even more so in real estate.

After the 2008 crash, many new safeguards and controls were put in place. With the election of Donald Trump, almost all these protections have been removed or rendered useless. In addition, banks and other entities have taken on massive degrees of risk. If the markets rise, there is no problem. But when the markets break, the potential for financial and economic crisis becomes extreme. The new Fed chairman is aware of this and I’m sure that yesterday’s market plunge of 1,750 at the low was a kind of baptism of fire. The “cover” story will be that the markets are concerned by the potential of rising interest rates. Many other “cover” stories were “recruited” during the day—a standard technique when panic comes visiting. You will see stories about how the quants and others “predicted” this crash, lots of stories about “do not panic,” lots of stories about “just the usual ups and downs.”

Most of this is total nonsense.

Manish Jain: “Our work is to recover wisdom and imagination”