Ordering of the Passions

I've been trying to narrow down what the core causes of the general irrational madness I have seen grow and bloom in American culture during the past few years. This is a tree that has born the fruit of narcissist selfie culture, emotionally kinky oversharing on social media and, lately, the grotesque types of emotional overreactions leading up to and following our recent presidential election.

I swear that this will be the last post that has anything to do with politics for a while, and really I'm just using politics here as an extreme example of the larger issue, which is the fact that, as a society, we seem to be increasingly addicted to unchecked emotive responses to the world around us rather than engaging our minds to figure out what is at the root of our responses and understanding them.

What the fuck am I talking about?

Well, I'll have to start by saying that I have been reading a lot about the "Dark Ages" and its antecedents in West, East and Middle East. No, I'm not secretly gearing up to begin a Dan Carlin style Hardcore History podcast. I've been researching the transition from the Bronze to the Iron age in those cultures, particularly looking at the development, establishment and spread of advanced metallurgical technologies.

This research has yielded all manner of choice factids and surprising nuggets. For instance: the earliest "Iron" weapons in the East were daggers and swords with alloyed copper cores, bronze blades and GET THIS cutting edges made from ferric meteorites! Mandate of Heaven, indeed! This technology also came not from China but to China from the Steppe peoples who likely got it from the Vedic civilizations of the Indian sub-continent. It is known, for instance, that the Vikings were trading furs along the Silk Road for ingots of carbon steel produced in India that they, in turn, fashioned into the famous Ulfberht swords as early as 600 AD. I digress.

Chinese Alchemical Smelting Furnace

Anyway, aside from the aforementioned cocktail trivia, the real meat of getting into and understanding the evolution of metallurgy involves understanding that 1) these people were practicing science and 2) science of that time was not a highly specialized endevour as we know it today, where you can make a career from being an expert in a particular species of flatworm, but rather a broad and interdisciplinary science that encompassed astrology, "magic", philosophy, chemistry, psychology and a broad swath of interests we'll, for the sake of brevity, call the Occult. This scientific system is most commonly referred to today as Alchemy.

"BULLSHIT!!!!" I hear you say. "Those people were a bunch of superstitious old fools who thought they could turn lead into gold and were busy trying to get little men to fly out of their test tubes. That is not science! That is crazy people shit!" Point is taken. Yes, that is what the average person thinks about when they think of Alchemy, if they indeed think of it at all and I am not going to go into great detail here trying to show you that that view is a tad myopic. Instead I'll just note that quite a number of people that are revered by scientific history were, in complete fact, raging Alchemists.

Sir Isaac Newton: Fucking Alchemist

   Again, for the sake of brevity I'll name one: Sir Isaac fucking Newton. Yes, the guy that Newtonian Physics are named after. The Co-creator of Differential Calculus. Optics. Color Theory. Head of the Royal Society. That guy. Total Alchemist.

What does any of this have to do with people rage hating on Twitter, snapping selfies and all that "greater societal ill"?

I am getting there.

So, I had to (for the sake of research?) run down and try to understand Alchemy in an effort to figure out where all this pre-scientific science shit was coming from. Hold on tight now, it's going to get a LOT weirder before we end up landing softly on my point of this whole post. Now realize I am going to have to grossly simplify things and leave out a bunch of shit but, in the main, what I am about to say is truthful.

Alchemy, at least in the West and Middle East, is the product of the teachings of what have been called "the Hermetic Texts" written by Hermes the Thrice Great who, in turn got these texts or the core ideas for the texts from Egyptian who in turn likely got them from, wait for it, an ancient technologically advanced civilization that was destroyed by some sort of great disaster like a flood. Yes, we're getting into some weird spaces here but please note that these are not my beliefs, this is what the history of the Hermetic wisdoms are claiming: "All this Shit Came from Atlantis, man."

"Are you claiming that "Mr. Science", Sir Isaac fucking Newton, believed that science and a bunch of other shit came from the lost civilization of Atlantis? Are you out of your mind?" Yes, I am saying that and no, if anyone is crazy here, it's Isaac Newton.

I totally ordered the shit out of my passions when I chose to not put a Black Science Man meme here.

 So we now get closer to my elusive point.

Coming with all this science from Atlantis comes a lot of other stuff. The Hermetic traditions permeate Western thought in the Middle Ages and some ideas that look a lot like Hermetic stuff also end up in pre-millenial Chinese thought. One of these concepts is sometimes called "The Ordering of the Passions" which basically boils down to this: strive not to be a slave to your emotions and desires but rather their master, drawing energy from intensity and channeling it into thoughtful, well reasoned creative acts.

Let's all read that again and then contemplate all the examples we've seen lately of actual grown up adults (who should fucking know better) acting like spoiled children having a temper-tantrum:

"Strive not to be a slave to your emotions and desires but rather their master, drawing energy from intensity and channeling it into thoughtful, well reasoned creative acts." 

If you can argue with that, you can argue with anything.

Big Sexy on opening night of La Fama BBQ

Recipe

Mac and Cheese Sauce or the Alchemy of Cream

The origin of this recipe dates back to Hurricane Sandy when I and my crack team of culinary commandos boarded an Avianca 757 at JFK the day after the Hurricane and flew to Bogota, Colombia to open the very first American BBQ restaurant in South America. Steve "Big Sexy" Harit, who I had stolen from the restaurant of that bald Greek guy chef bro with much relish, was tasked with developing the recipes for the sides. I won't recount all the amazing things he pulled completely out of his ass in a strange country full of strange ingredients but one memorable recipe is this one here. It is simple, easy and WAY better than any Mac and Cheese I have had before or since.



Ingredients:

1 quart heavy cream
1 onion, halved
2-3 cups shredded cheddar cheese or cheese du jour
Salt
hot sauce

Begin

Take one half of the onion and coat it with oil and then set it, flat side down, in a cast iron or other pan over high heat. Disconnect smoke alarms. Cook the onion half until it is moderately blackened. This is called an Onion Broule'.

Now place onion is a sauce pan with the cream and simmer for 5-7 minutes to get the good oniony flavor crystals out. Remove onion. Season with salt and hot sauce to taste then add the cheese and whisk it into the sauce. Taste again for seasoning then toss with your undercooked (if the label says 7 minutes, do 4 minutes) pasta of choice, slide into a casserole and cover with breadcrumbs. Bake 10 minutes in a 450' oven or until crumbs are golden, NOT burnt.

Pairing

 Colombian Beer (Poker or Club Colombia in the can), cheap cocaine, Aqua Diente sin Azucar.