Here is a rough draft of my essay: Two. Nevermind how rough and ugly it is, I am working it beautiful. The great distinction and interrelation between truth and love is the theme of it.
![Raffaello - Stanze Vaticane - The School of Athens (detail) [01].jpg](cid:image001.jpg@01C9EB82.77DC6C60)
Two
A binary is not a system. At best, a binary can be a systeme—the smallest configuration of a system. In this sense, many concepts can be opposed to one or more other concepts, and this makes for configurations. As with the tetramatrix, and any numerically based system, you can polarize a set of categories into columns. Here is the famous sexual categories.
| Man | Woman |
| Up | Down |
| Right | Left |
| North | South |
| West | East |
| Good | Evil |
| High | Low |
| Spirit | Flesh |
| Sky | Earth |
| Sun | Moon |
| Out | In |
| White | Black |
And the columns could continue indefinitely. The basis of any binary rests in your normative origination. The originary pair determine the shape of the set.
However, the nature of the binary itself is open to question. As the typical binary has it, West is either/or, East is both, neither. The West hierarchizes its binaries, whereas the East compliments them. At the basis of the Western binary, then, is the contrast of good/bad. That distinction determines all the other sets. Derrida attempted to get past this through deconstructing the binary, to deconstruct binary itself. He did not want the East where the binaries are complementary; he wanted to overthrow the system altogether. Which is merely one more binary: binary versus nonbinary.
The project of the 21st century, of the 3rd millenium, is to unite the world. A system that integrated East and West would be Either/And: quaternal.
Either this or that,
either this and that,
neither this nor that,
neither this, but that.
Which brings us back to the tetramatrix. The future is four.
The opposite of a thing is never its nonexistence. Non-A is no opposite to A. If anything, the nonA is the frame of A, for it puts around it a limit. Non-desk is the entire universe which gives the desk a place and purpose. This is justice, and all other things are nonjustice. But injustice itself is no opposite to justice, being made of the same sort of stuff, a social network, and sense of fairness, a social system. Nonjustice is all things unrelated to justice. Therefore, the saying that “hate is not the opposite of love, but apathy is,” misses the point. Apathy is the nonexistence of passion, and, therefore, is the negative space of all passions. But the opposite of passion for would be passion against. Apathy, if it were the opposite of love, would equally be the opposite of cruelty, hate, fear, and guilt.
Augustine was troubled to believe that God authored all things, because then God authored evil, and then human beings are innocent—unthinkable!— that would make Augustine unique in spiting the mother he craved, uniquely guilty! Therefore, he defined evil as “an absense of good.” But an absense is only noticable in the presense of a should-be. If that speck of dust lacks good, is it therefore evil? There must be a vaccuum, and thus a shell to preserve the vaccuum, for there to be a not-but-should-be. And being a vaccuum, it must be carefully created to last in an atomsphere were good is everywhere in all things. Let us clean our science from theology!
Evil is too much of something, something that overwhelms us, more than we can bear. Evil is too good. Well then, what is bad? Bad is bad for us, something that denies our needs. Everything equally exists, is equally there, but some things fulfill us, others deny us.
Everything has its place. Nothing is always part of something, as my coffee contains no supernovas, it is filled of nothing but coffee. In the same way, all of the branches of study are modes of talk. Therefore, language itself, the clucks of the tongue, are everything: the university is tongue training. The tongue takes two shapes:
Logos and literature. Plato differentiates logos versus mythos (philosophy versus religion); literature is broader than mythos. The Logos and Literature distinction derives from love versus truth. Science versus art speaks it best, and history flows up into philosophy and science, science flows down into art and politics.
| | philosophy / science | -- | technology / art | | ||
| historyÈ | | | | Ê politics | ||
Why this breakdown? How is there a polarization of truth and love? Truth is reason, love is emotion. Or in social terms: some of us prefer to work with ideas and numbers, others prefer to work with people and relationships. This could fall back in with the man/woman distinction, but not necessarily. There is no one sex to love, and indeed, the sexing of love is to make love into one thing. There is masculine love and there is feminine love.
Let us focus then on people versus ideas. In the either/and mindset, one is the focus, the other the outlet. The philosopher, for instance, focuses on ideas, but he expresses them to people.
Incidentally, the Eastern Monism seems to me a quick-trip to its conclusion—“all is one, dualities are fake, all is Brahma.” Yet monism distinguishes itself from dualism. It still maintains that the world is maya, illusion, not Brahma. The Western monism says that the Universe is the Material, devided into many interrelated parts. If you wish to unify a duality, do this through careful attention, not through unfocusing the eyes. Integration is done by mind, not by faith.
Love or truth, person or system. A personality is harder to define and easier to understand than a system. It takes an intellectual to systematize his actions to accord with Kant, but anybody can ask “what would Jesus do?” Why? Because as humans, we understand personality systems more then logical systems. Logic requires abstract focus on principles. Personality is intuitively accessible, if impossible to define or fully predict.
| Love | Truth |
| Love | Fear |
| People | Ideas |
| Rest | Power |
| Flesh | Mind |
| Earth | Spirit |
| Sex | Violence |
| Life | Death |
Previously I contrasted love with fear. Now I contrast love with truth. In what way is truth related to fear? Fear is not about cowardice; but about recognizing danger and reacting to it. Thus, courage, bravery, dominance, submission, these are all fear attitudes. The decorated war hero is a fear based thinker. It is in terms of danger and power that he exerts himself. Whether he feels fearful of others, or feels noble dominance, he is focusing on power and not love. The love he has bows to power.
Truth is power, yes, and the need for power is fear. As it is said: the weak in courage are strong in cunning.
Remember that Maslowe categorized the basic hierarchy of needs in a pyramidal structure of physical needs, safety needs, belonging needs, esteem needs, aesthetic needs, truth needs, and the need for self-actualization. Belonging is about power and love. How we fit into the group is both who loves us, and also who uses us. To be love and to be respected, desired and important. A job, for instance, grants a sense of belonging. If a man is depressed, working any job amidst respectful peers will cheer him, as it is rightly said: work cures depression. The busy bee forgets her worries. There is no better cure, for purpose calls forth flow, and depression is only a freeze of flow.
Love versus truth, and thus, love is on the side of deceit and artifice. One wins his maiden through her ears, not her eyes; speaks in rhymes not syllogisms. To have secrets, and especially secrets from oneself, gives a sense of depth, autonomy of the unconscious, relaxing of the will.
The truth of love is that it holds no love of truth.
We attract lovers in a way none of us understand; we enjoy for its mystery.
Freud famously divided the libido into two directions: thanatos and eros. Less mythologically, more directly, we have in fact a very ancient binary of making and destroying. Or to chart it out:
| Analysis | Synthesis |
| Cutting | Combining |
| Violence | Sex |
| Truth | Love |
| Concept | Relationship |
New names for old things will put a man’s name in the history books.
Since sex and violence can never be dissected from the other, but every act of sex is also an act of violence, and every act of violence is also an act of sex, we ought not say that they are “opposites” so much as degrees of one act: care.
Sex and violence inhabit every atom of our discourse. Sex—that which joins two things, love; violence—that which divides one thing, fear. Charisma is a form of sex, a need to fill the hole of a love; nobility is a form of violence, the need to fend off from the whole of our power.
To desire freedom, one must be a slave. Freedom is sought through violence, the breaking away of two things.
According to the Greeks, and particularly their Theogony, the original being was Kaos, and from her sprang Eros. Kaos is clutter and disorder, all parts pushing away from each other, and Eros is simplicity and union, partners pulling together. We would expect chaos to be a man, and eros to be a woman, but here the mythologies are subtle: a woman is chaos but a man does chaos; a woman does eros but a man is eros. From the interection of these beings, the universe becomes Cosmos, Beauty. In the Bible, we also begin first with Oceanic Darkness, and only later does Consciousness order words. Scientifically, these stories mislead, but psychologically, they describe inner experience.
Science is to schizm and scissor off a bit of reality, to intellect, to lecture between the lines, to read between, and pick out the delectable pieces, to grab at the logos, the select bits of experience, to read out of, riddle out, reason out, find the ratio between experiences, to compare them, to parse them into parts and partner them as equals, to weigh them manually, and thus measure them, as a music is measured, and man the measure of all things, man being the mindful, by which is meant, the mentor of wisdom, the wise, to wit, having vision, to see, as the seer, to notice, to know, to gnosticate, to think, a thanking of the feel of thought.
Magic is the power to make magnifient machines, to might as he may to maximize, being the potent master, the paternal maker, the ruler, rector, regal straight maker, having the power to make potent poems, the technology by technique by which we work the urge to create, with increasing crescendo, like a growing cresent, as the grass beneath the moon, which with horns turned left, grow like a left-hand increase in creativeness as is capable by the disciple who loosens the the text through analysis, breaking apart, and finally does, facilates, makes into fact, fashions, figures, forms out of dough, does the bread, morphs it into form—as bread-making was the first magic, the first and only transubstantiation from grain to bread, the broken, fraction, shared between friends, the change of life into life, through the gift of fire, to artifice the articles, by arms, to articulate the articles, the parts into a joint, a joining of pieces.
The verse is the universe’s trope, who turns a phrase, who walks it out, making like a vulva, a thrown twist, a circle, inverting, reverting, converting, diverting, by ever twisting into twos back on herself, doubling,the duo-plus, two-fold, ever turning, returning, circles, to throw in a circle, to throw, reject, introject, conjecture, the objects and subjects before and under our experience, a testing of a text, weaved and textured, in circles like a spindle, spinning by the tactile touch of textile, the textured and embedded technique, as all technique was originally weaving, and all making was originally bread: cloth and bread, the basis of it all, food and warmth, and also to build buildings.
And all this from need, the nautical, the idea of death, that lover of life that makes mortals creative, necessary necrophilia.
The American virtue of speech is directness. This couples beautifully with the American extroversion, and thus with anti-intellectualism, inventiveness, and cinema-celebrity culture—home of the brave. What is the value of indirectness?
Indirectness accords with fear, and thus with subtlety and intelligence. An introvert, when faced with a problem in the world, when insulted by a coworker, does not spit the poison back. That is heroic, to slap for slap. No, the coward “prays for his enemies,” or, in other words, internalizes his enemies. He becomes divided and brews poison. The poison will be given as the sweet kindness that secretly pours coals over the heads of others.
Intellectualization. It is based on wishing to control problems through ideas. Though logic is direct, a direct play of identities, intellectualization itself is an indirection because it does not directly answer problems. Intellect wishes to comprehend the problem, perhaps ruminate on it for weeks. Intellect interprets reality, changes it, represents it as ideas, and addresses those ideas.
Intellectualization is not interested on solving external problems, but internalizing the problems, and solving them here. The external problem may persist. A man, for instance, might be a failure at relationships; he studies and understands the flaws of his relationships, knows why they go wrong and why they should go better in the future, but never changes his habits.
To intellectualize ideas is to put between needs and memories on the one hand, and senses and the world on the other, a symbolic, for the mind is symbol, to make all realities easily handled by abbreviated symbols. This innovation alone of alchemy, that elements could be symbolized and handled as symbols, created all science as we know it. Newton was an alchemist: that’s where it comes from, the ability to symbolize experience with glyphs. Telling stories was not enough, we needed the Egyptian matheme, the drawing.
At best, intellectualization is a temporary working out of a game plan. The mind, used best, pours forth into changing the external.
An extreme introvert indirects everything into feelings. This renders him hermetic to the world: he doesn’t play the game. He may grow resentful of the world and its demands. He prefers solitude. Good for the person who needs it.
Procrastination is indirection. One avoids the pain of reality by putting it off. But because it hurts to put off, to be indirect, procrastination worsens the problem. To attack problems directly and instantly makes strong (if not smart).
Ultimately, we have the strong and beautiful, or the clever and cunning. Rarely is genius beautiful. Or if beautiful, he is yet wounded. The brilliant are neither strong nor beautiful. The strong and beautiful—the blessed for eternity—are always simple (American, even), because they are direct. The cowards, the weak, the ugly—also the slaves and the faithful religious—must live by poison, seek to weaken and control the strong.
The great ones in heaven are the handsome and beautiful, the strong and brave, the laughing and cheerful, the rich and hard working. Not a word of this describes us, but then again, we desire no heaven. We are after grander matters.
America is strong and beautiful. Thus her simplicity and lack of philosophy. Philosophy is for greybeards. America is yet too young for philosophy.
Logos is reason and reasonable speech; applied, it is accomplishment. Literature is emotion and beautiful speech; applied, it is relationship.
The essential task of logos is to analyze. Thus it is invading, violent, distilling. Analysis is something active you do to passive experience. Sensations happen to us, but analysis we do. Thus the familiar breakdown of passive/active.
Logos as linear is akin to the striated muscles, those linear, powerful, masculine organs.
The logos invades other things and seeks to be contained within them; as in the man seeking to penetrate the mysteries of the womb. It is man’s fate to intellectually contain his wife, and his wife’s fate to emotionally contain her husband. But since logos is a scalpel, it works to comprehend the container, to break down the the mysteries of life. These images are mythed in the story of the Teutonic Giant who became the universe, or the Semetic Mother Goddess who was dismembered into the cosmos. Each child goes through a biting phase in which he would wish to gobble his mother up, pull her hair, and surround himself in her. The tantrum phase of children is about destroying the world they are just beginning to comprehend, and letting their desire smash it to pieces. Two and three are about power first, and love becomes the demanded thing, instead of the requested or evenly met. By the time the child is able to love his mother as she loves him, he no longer can, and must discover an equal.
The logos is a system of ideas, as opposed to literature which is a system of person. Some of this is teased in the logos poem of the book of John: the Greek idea of logos is commandeered into a poem about Jesus ceasing to be a logos, and becoming a person. There was no Greek Logos in the first book of Genesis. The Greeks had moved from mythology to philosophy:
mythology à religion à philosophy à art à technology à information
The Greeks were readily able to transfer from mythology (and its curlicues of religion) into philosophy, with few hybrids of theology between. The medieval gestation pushed the philosophy of the Greeks—their humanism—back into a womb of theism, which was finally overthrown by the Renaissance art, followed by the Enlightenment science, and its industrial revolution.
I make no distinction between writing and speech; they are both communications, easily interchangeable. Literature, which derives from the word “letter” is merely one form of spoken / written word. The finger and the tongue both seek to press the love of language into the beloved.
Whereas logos is analytical, literature is integrating. Art wishes to show a whole picture, as painting is nonlinear, and presents a whole picture. Thus, it relies on symbols, as opposed to logos, which relies on signs.
Logos is paraphrasable. The truth can take infinite forms, and still be essentially the same truth. But beauty must stick to one form to be the same beauty. Learn math from this book or that, it’s the same math, but read about this hero or that hero, and the difference is complete. Logos is literal, literature literary. Literature is nontranslatable. In its most literary form, the poem, any attempt at translating it between languages is ludicrous. A translation of a poem is merely a new poem inspired by the old.
As logos seeks to break the essential from the complex, it is the violent muscle, the masculine. Literature wants to contain her reader in her comforting muscle—the womb. It is muscle envy, not mere penis envy, which characterizes the femine. The poet is filled with womb envy. Freud’s relationship to Nietzsche should be clear here: he felt overinfluenced by Nietzsche’s ideas.
Logos is about content, literature style. Logos strives for simplicity whereas literature strives for richness. Literature is repetitive and dramatic; it is rhetoric, made up of tropes. Logos is simplistic and direct; it is argument, made up of syllogism.
And by now the complexion is felt: you can guess at the rest.
What is psychology? A logos, apparently, but a logos about people.
Psychology is indeed a logos, because it isn’t interested in person studies, but cases from which we can universalize. Psychology is not dramatic, not narrative based. It attempts to be a science, and thus a logos.
And does the whole enterprise of philosophy get this treatment? Yes, of course. But you must not imagine an either/or. Remember the either/and. This is the framework of the yin yang emblem, in which yes, I am black, but not all black; I am literature, but I use logical constructions; I am philosophy, but I use rhetoric to speak. The either / and implies you must choose either, and get a part of the other as well: for one flows into the other.
Logos, in its most reified as math emphasizes the atomistic of experience, and thus analyzes the world into the slightest nuances; literaturature, in its most reified, poetry, emphasizes the thick of experiences, and thickens the world.
Propaganda art is failed arts. Dadaism, for instance, begins with a manifesto, and so is not even art, but a sort of philosophical experiment. Since Beauty is no mother to it, that art hurts the eyes.
Story is universal. We all pattern our lives on the stories we hear. The ear is a labyrynth, the hero threads his way inwards.
Lawyers, critics, theologians, psychologists are all rhetoricians. We ought to combine and mingle the axioms of each discipline into a basic field of study: interpretation. Rhetoric is interpretation made beauty. Stories about stories.
The womanly practice of psychoanalsis, to see your whole life in terms of family orgy, is merely codified gossip. That is the nature of most stories, the family struggle, since people get most dramatic when they are pressed close to each other, and not unlike cats or mice, start to devour each other.
Love and glory: that is all that matters. Or rather, what is lovely, and what is seen as glorious—that is greatness itself, is the center of this bipole.
Therefore, the so called great three ideas of beauty, goodness, and truth are only two: beauty and truth are goods, the only goods, and virtue is the activity to achieve them. Aside from truth and beauty – power and sex, all the thousands of terms and figures for the same double – there is no need for goodness at all, for there is no goodness other than these. Most trinities suffer from a superfluous item, or two of them, as in the Christian trinity.
The one, two, three of love and power, two distinct goals in life, is the truth of all twos: the third is the one they share. Love and Power are both forms of freedom. The two great forces of the soul are love and power. Raphael and Emerson are lovers, Nietzsche and Beethoven are powers.
Graph
| Logos | Literature |
| Analyzing | Integrating Connection Belongingness Love |
| Invades | Contains |
| One takes in nonfiction | One is taken in by fiction |
| Considers | Participates |
| System Simplification Simple Categorical | Person Repetition Rich Dramatic |
| Justice | Poetic Justice (appropriateness), not always formulable in rules Proper |
| Discipline Work | Play |
| The more logos “makes you think,” while you read, the better. | The more literature “makes you think” while reading, the worse. The more it takes you into a new world, the more successful it is |
| Signs | Symbols |
| Literal | Literary |
| Paraphrasable | Nontranslatable |
| Simplicity | Richness |
| Logic | Creativity |
| Argument | Rhetoric |
| Muscle | Womb |
| Content | Style |
| Violence Analsysis Individuality | Sex Creativity Community |
My reading skills, insofar as they are learned, owe little to Michigan State University, but plenty to two worshipping Jews: Mortimer Adler and Harold Bloom. Both of them are idolaters sent on this earth to praise greater men (Mortimer praises Aristotle, Bloom Shakespeare). Adler knows little about literature, and Bloom knowns little of philosophy. Therefore, they are a good marriage, and I recommend them both to the one youthful in the ways of reading.
Why did Adler love Aristotle so much, and Bloom love Shakespeare so much? For if nothing else, praise makes us curious. (Worship is merely a form of advertising). Well it is because Adler was an idea man and Bloom was a character man.
Adler wrote a list of the “103 great ideas of the Western tradition,” a list I have tried to turn into a sort of periodic table. In his books “the syntopicon” he gives a careful index of each of these ideas as they appear in the Great Books. For Adler, ideas are it. He admires philosophers, and admires poets only insofar as they enrich philosophy.
Are we also close to this? The masculine pride of seeking the truth, of logifying an idea, of debate?
Bloom, on the other hand, loves composing lists of the most important personalities in literature (Hamlet, Don Quixote, Yahweh, Jesus, Lear, etc.) and sometimes the personalities behind literature (Montaigne, Kierkegaard). The crux? What is the need behind these two obsessions, for ideas and characters?
Remember the eternal goods: truth, beauty, justice, politics, kindness, and industry. These are goods to do, goods to seek, and ultimately each of them is either idea-shaped or person-shaped. But the Ideas of Mortimer Adler are as rich and sophisticated as any character Bloom adores. Ideas are persons. The difference, then, lies in one of control. Do we want to contain an idea, shape and apply it to our own life, or do we want to follow after a character? If we worship another character, than we are extroverts who seek to be contained in something larger than ourselves: the great heroes first, and ultimately, in mankind himself. The philosopher is introverted. He wishes to comprehend ideas, to enact them. He is focused on himself, on his own power.
Neither orientation is essentially “weak,” or “wrong.” Both are extremely personal choices that resonate with who you are and how you’ve cultivated your needs.
I find “Christian philosophy” an oxymoron. But I even find Buddhismm, which sometimes claims to be a philosophy and not a religion, equally an oxymoron when divorced from religion. They are both clearly art forms—dances really, which the follower lives in his life by imitation. Imitatio Christi may equally be Imitatio Buddhi. They are personality cults, as all religions must be; they are not concerned with “truth” in the least bit, but with “love” “enlightenment,” “beautiful feelings.” (Nor do I miss the irony that Adler died a practicing Catholic, from love of Aquinas rather than Jesus, and Bloom will die an atheist, for love of Shakespeare.)
So let’s look at a true confusion of genres. Taoism. The Tao is not the truth, is not a philosophy, but yet it is not yet a person. What the Tao is to the Taoist, Truth is to the philosopher. Each idea—justice, virtue, truth, society, man, goodness—is a rich tradition, and unlike most charcters of fiction, can dance in the minds of any philosopher since. We all think in these terms, these great Ideas, and we all add our own wisdom to them. This is called “the Great Converstation.” Every philosopher worth his name will have read the previous great philosophers, and thought their same thoughts, and comprehened them, and then felt fit to correct or amplify those thoughts.
I have included Adler’s list of “Great Ideas,” as well as an ad hoc list derived primarily from Bloom of “Great Characters.” A fluency in both is the earmark of a good education. To be able to talk meaningfully of ideas and personalities is the greatest wisdom a University can impart—if they can.
The great ideas
MATTER AND ITS PROPERTIES
Matter – Being Form Beauty Time Space Eternity
Chance Cause Fate Change
Universe World
LIFE AND ITS PROPERTIES
Man Animal Nature Evolution Life and Death (Angel God Immortality)
HUMAN FACULTIES
Emotion – Desire Happiness Pleasure and Pain
Memory and Imagination
Mind – Judgment Reasoning Experience Will
Body – Health and Sickness Sense
Soul
Habit –Virtue and Vice Wisdom Sin Temperance Courage Prudence Justice Honor Love
LANGUAGE AND ORGANIZATION OF IDEAS
Language – Definition Sign and Symbol Relation Communication
Logic – Induction Element Hypothesis Dialectic Principle
Category and System –Opposition, Good and Evil, Universal and Particular, One and Many, Quality, Necessity and Contingency, Same and Other, Quantity, Infinity, Part and Whole
Knowledge – Idea Opinion Truth
BRANCHES OF STUDY (Education)
Language
Mathematics – Logic
Science – Astronomy Medicine Physics Mechanics
Philosophy – Metaphysics
History
Art – Poetry Rhetoric Plot
Religion – Prophecy Theology Duty
RELATIONS BETWEEN HUMAN BEINGS
State Citizen Constitution
Government – Family Democracy Aristocracy Monarchy Oligarchy Tyranny
Power and Control – Custom and Convention Duty Punishment Education Law
Justice Liberty Progress
War and Peace Revolution
Ownership and Exchange – Wealth Labor Slavery
The great characters
Odysseus, Achiles
Plato’s Socrates
Yahweh, Moses, David
Buddha
Jesus
Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Falstaff
The lady of Bath, the Pardoner, the Knight
Erasmus’ Folly
Huckleberry Finn
Don Quixote, Sancho Panza
Captain Ahab
Beatrice & Dante
Aeneus
Oedipus, Antigone
Prometheus
Milton’s Satan
Faust
Alyosha, Mitya, Ivan
Plutarch’s Lycurgus, Alexander, Caesar, Numa
Roark
Authors who are characters:
Montaigne, Emerson, Nietzche, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Freud, Whitman
A fusion of idea and person is the plot. We all love a good story. Indeed, this is instinctive, is a sort of bee’s dance, by which we orient ourselves. All information is ordered like a story.
The story is a system of cause and effect.
The distinction between idea and person is akin to cold and warm. Those who are warm are passionate with having desires and thus being desirable. They want, above all, contact, and especially that oscillating contact called sexual, closer-farther, closer-farther. Where does one put his warmth?
Warm stands for love, closeness and social ties, whereas cold stands for intellect, genius, brilliance, distance, loneliness. To be outwardly cold, and inwardly warm is the preferred stance of a woman. If you can get past her walls, you could grow warm with her. Then there are the charismatics, who are outwardly warm--they can flirt, can make people like them and desire them, but on their innermost they are cold, intellectual, calculating, brilliant, alienating.
I return now to my original breakdown between love and fear. When I first presented it, still a Christian, I had prioritized the “love which drives out fear,” though my skeptical eyebrow still saw lies in the phrase “knowledge puffs up but love builds up.” These simple polarizations lie because they were superficial. They were blind to their own depths.
I still say that love is seeking an object and fear fleeing it, that these two directions sum up the basis of all desires, and that they can be summarized in the common difference between “towards and away.” Nevertheless, my claim that being a lover is superiour to being a coward has complicated itself, grown richer, fuller, deeper. Let us start with a graph:
| LOVE | FEAR |
| Devotion | Courage |
| Hearing | Seeing |
| Accent Inflection | Consonant Articulation |
| Deceit | Truth |
| Comfort | Daring |
| Friendship | Authority |
| Equality | Heirarchy |
| Synthesis | Analsysis |
This complicates fear. Fear is the awareness of danger, of the need for power, of power itself. Fear is always a fear of loss of power, is also, in its way, the loss of love. Thus fear-power is the basis of truth, of the way the world actually is, and not merely how we wish it were. A strong fear for the truth is reverence for the truth, is the basis of integrity.
There is nothing pretty about the Hegelian synthesis, where we would unite these opposites into fearlove. It is vital that both constantly act inside the human soul, even on the same objects, that all the other derivitive desires—jealousy, pity, anger, gratitude, guilt, pride—cluster under them and grow strong by them. The heart is multivalent; to castrate an emotion for mere comfort is to disallow strength.
Nor do I fancy Derrida, with his deconstruction of binaries—never quite escaping them, never quite getting anywhere, ultimately circumsizing the whole reason completely off. We cannot use this breakdown of constructed binaries by finding elements that escape it, by showing its inner tensions or contradictions. Rather, we admit that it is a construction, which we by nature adore to apply as another pair of eyes. Even “deconstructed” must coexist with the still “constructed” ideas, that he stengthens logos by pretending to dismantle it.
It will seem obvious to my readers, then, that love, sex, literature, people, correspond to a feminine principle, and this may be true. Women, we are told, are aroused by words and situations, not by seeing and controlling. Women want to hear it, believe their ears, can, therefore, easily be tricked, for “seeing is believing,” but “don’t believe everything you hear.” Rhetoric, poetry, trope, all ear games, all useful for presenting the truth, and for misrepresenting the truth.
In love we must have joy and suffering, whereas in fear we have war and peace. Nirvana, the kingdom of heaven, the world of forms are three formulas that refer to the intellect, what I call the “assumptions,” where the painful love-and-struggle memories are converted into pure and noble truths. Thus we can say again, it is love versus power. And power is the greater of the two. With love you depend on the external, you must court it, and miss it when it is gone. But with truth, the truth is something you have within you, something you are, something self-dependent and noble.
Love is necessarily in the category of deceit. To love another is a form of deceit. Unless that love is tempered with a strong fear, it will be unjust, unfair, will exploit and tyrranize. Distrust love. Love romantacizes the beloved; love disfigures her. When a man is in complete truth, he will not need love so much as friendship. And if he were to sell his freedom for family, well let him do it to learn, and not merely to love. For love corrupts the mind; one sees what is lovely, and invents lovely things to see. We need both, we need both. One to check the other.
What then of “duty,” “obligation,” “responsibility,” those evil words they use to snare you? Those words by which they bind you? Are they love or are they fear? For we pretend that they come of love, that we are dutiful to our family because we love them, that we are responsible to others because we love them. Or is it fear? That we fear failing our duty, our obligation, our responsibility? But these are means of control, are means of holding you to one spot: of course they are power, binding the will. But they do not bind us out of fear alone, by threatening us, but by threatening that which we love. They cannot escape each other: every love is a fear, every fear a love. And perhaps we must set both down when we wish to first and always let our I create.
And as always, these two movements, towards and away, are the same movement, the movement towards life. We love a woman, and are afraid to lose her. We are afraid of danger, for love of our life. They are necessarily double, opposite and equally present in every feeling.
“Love” and all the strong affects in general, when put against “fear” and specifically, the turning away called “truth” show that love, by itself needs to be contained within truth. Love without truth is dangerous—always a mistake. Truth without love? Can be useful. “Cold” can be helpful in life. Therefore, truth is the controlling affect, is the originary, is the central affect. Truth tells you whom to love, why to love, how to love, when to love, and love, in turn, loves truth. Philo-sophy, friend of wisdom. The philosophers were not yet wisdom, but they loved her. And it was first knowing the truth of wisdom that allowed it to harness love towards wisdom. Knowledge builds all things, and love fills them up.
Love/art/language // Fear/truth/power. Of course power must be primary. For before animals evolved sex, they required the power to preserve themselves. The power to survive precedes even the love of one-self. One wills to survive, to fear death, to seek truth, to gain power, without really even feeling it at all. One does it. That is our most basic primary. This is why, when a man is attacked, affronted, put into an emergency, he may give up his love, but he will not give up his power. His body will soak him with adrenaline for power, that he may above all survive.
Love without the power of kindness—for kindness is not love, is in fact a form of power—is a mistake. It is a love that desires but knows not how to act. Kindness is a skill, learned through practice.
Love – beauty – death // truth – war – immortality.
A subtlety in the system. Love and beauty are the songs of poets, and the poet is nothing more than the urge for immortality. But the poet creates from power his poem, and makes the poem immortal, and so his soul and spirit through the poem. Should not love be immortal rather than truth? Yet only mortal things love, romance is a mammalian invention; eternal beings may love as well, but insofar as she loves, she too is mortal, for we cannot love a truth, but only a living and dying being. Only change can be loved, and change is a flux of life and death. Beauty is the inspiration for immortality, and we seek a power to preserve her.
“Love makes the world go round,” said the French, in reference to our willingness to cooperate with society due to our love of family and friends. “Money makes the world go round,” is the American reply, and when we skin away the paper leaf of money, we come to the root of money: power.
We are all symbolic whores, in that we exchange symbolic sex and symbolic money all the time, if we recognize the sex in all admirations and friendliness, and the money in all exchange and bargaining. Power, which stands behind money, and is the meaning behind it. Money stands for a value, and is a tool, a power, by which to exchange unlike things at unlike times.
Society is sex and violence. There is a sexual dimension and there is a power dimension always acting, always feeling, amidst every two people. A man walks down the street and merely has to look at the eyes, the posture, the walk, the hands of another man, and immediately knows who has the greater will, who the greater intelligence, who the stronger body. A man looks upon a woman, and a woman on a man, and in their unconscious they have already had the sex that could happen between them, whatever form that would be; their entire relationship is based on this already having had sex, this symbolic sex, and this symbolic violence.
Exchanging unlike for unlike, for things mutually exclusive, is the corrupter of both money and love. A prostitute ruins the dollar, ruins the romance, even for the chaste man who never knows the prostitute.
Anybody who has read Mein Kampf—and I mean really read it, and not moved their eyes over it and let our society tell them what to think—will instantly and easily see that Hitler was not a hater, but a lover. Hitler loved his mother, and after that and above all else, he loved Germany. His hate for the Jews—far overemphasized the point of obliterating his driving force and mission in life—is a side-issue, a red-herring, a deliberate trick in order to enact the dramatic love-together movement of the Nazis. The Nazis were and are guided by a great loyalty. The Nazis stand for love. Beware love.
That the Nazis are never understood this way by anybody should be expected, because people do not see what is directly in front of their face. I could say a simple and true proposition, and never in any world be heard. I will say only that you must look again. Love is not the answer. Love is the problem. Love is demonic, and because it is demonic, it crosses borders and feeds hate.
Human needs must center human life. Human needs, and to connect these needs to consciousness—self-honesty. Self-honesty alone will save love and render love worthy. Truth, seeing things for what they are, touching reality, experience itself, over illusion, over self-deception, is the one thing that will save mankind. It is not “the truth shall set you free”—free from what? Free to what? This was said by a man who wanted to rule the world for eternity. The truth will show you your need. Your self alone can set you free, and never any externally communicated truth. What you are and what you will—that is the only freedom there is. “What is truth, that you, of all people, invoke it?” Pilate rightly said.
The only golden rule is this: be true, and above all, be self-true.
Power and love, in other words, are Will and Wisdom. Will and wisdom are the highest goods of man. A man who has a strong will and broad wisdom is the greatest being in the universe.
Will is mythologically called God, Yahweh, or really, any God, Zeus, Deus, Thor, Wotan, whatever. It is their divine WILL that matters. Wisdom is mythologically called Goddess, Sophia, or really, any Goddess, Tiamat, Serpant, Athena, Minerva. All mythology becomes clear once we see through the narrative to the concepts behind it. All mythology describes the inner experience, or it is bust.
It is useful to note that biblically, God lacked wisdom, that there never was a balance in the Biblical tradition. The Easterners, however, had plenty of wisdom, but lacked the western will.
The Germans were always profound, but never subtle, lacking style. They were willfull, will incarnate, the strongest people yet to conquer the earth, but, again, not wise enough.
Wisdom takes a lifetime to master. A person is not educated till 50 at the earliest. Then he ought to become a politician or teacher.
Will and wisdom, when put in a different register, are called power and love. We love wisdom, we fear power. As it has been said, the basic self deceits hide themselves under two types of rationalization: I am unworthy of love or I am helpless. Love and power are the great axis of mankind, woman the love, and man the power.
Will and wisdom are the highest goods of man. “Fear of will (Yahweh) is the start of wisdom” a complete nonsequitor. She would have spoken the truth if she said “manipulation of will is our wisdom.” But even still, she was not speaking as Wisdom herself.
Nietzsche valorized Power as the great One of life, which explained love but was not explained by it. Love is merely one kind of power, but love in and for itself is not powerful, but is a quasipower for the weak. Nietzsche’s weakness was his hidden love.
Indeed, no religion offers more then prelimanry hints into the possibilites of love and power. Christianity talks of love and obedience, but Buddhism sees love as merely one more practice to gain the power of enlightenment. Niether understands the deep nature of love, making something else love, making love a means.
The unconscious was first plumbed and mastered by Nietzsche, who “went under” and also “rose above” like the tree who “to reach the sun must sink deeper into earth.” As Jung would have it, mythology is about nothing but the unconscious and her relation to the conscious, when, in fact, mythology covers all of a man’s being, and not merely his mind (conscious) versus his habits (unconscious).
Consciousness is the blonde beast, the fierce piercing cock, maned in blond grapes. The unconscious is the serpant, a creature of the fire, the water, and the earth, which comes to stand, in her way, for everything, a universal symbol. For us, she is Sophia, wisdom, and, in a secondary sense, the daughter of Yahweh, maid Satan, the mermaid. The symbols are endless, and will help us little unless we take them in one sense, very seriously, and, in another sense, not seriously at all.
Power is the ability to focus, energy is the ability to select. In Eastern mysticisms, one seeks calm strength. This is the power to do what we want without adrenaline, worry, or frustration, the Tao, the naturalness of mastery. However, to gain more power, one must stretch himself beyond his current power with a dose of energy.
We see this contrast, say, when we are reading a book at night, and can continue to read it for hours, but if we have to change to another book or even another chapter, we haven’t the energy to change gears, and so we bookmark the page and fall asleep.
Strong power means one is deep and dense. Strong energy allows a wider radius.
Proximity is relatedness. This ancient and primeval tendency is the basis of rhetoric. Words that sound alike evoke each other so that they sit next to each other in the awareness. Put two words close to each other in a sentence, and we correspond them stronger than if they are kept apart. If you share a house with somebody, you are their roommate, whoever they are.
The ancients looked at meals as solidarity. If you eat like things, you are of the same stuff. If I cook for you, I put some of my own being in your food. It is for this reason that sex is sacred, and that any man who visits a prostitute sells his soul.
And thus, intimacy, to be good intimacy, requires defense, distance, violence, and boundaries. Boundaries are symbolic until they are transgressed; then they become violent. A bird says, “Where my song is heard, so is my territory.” Therefore, make rituals for your days, and observe them religiously. By demarking a certain activity as sacred, you delimit it, you sanctify it. Never mind what Bibles and creeds regard as Sacred. They always get it wrong. Nothing is sacred accept the creativity of your own mind.
Two rocks you took from the field behind your house, placed around your desk, become a natural barrier. A photo on a wall, your body odor on your clothes and furniture, the music you play on the stereo, all make a place your own, make the wrong people uncomfortable, will draw only those you wish drawn near. The bond of marriage is inviolate or it is nothing.
Who you eat with, who you cook for, who you compliment, and especially who you help, go a long way in determining who you are. Give to no charity. Rather, find a needful person of your own class, if you would give, and give to him. Charities are for the lazy. Give from your heart and give direct from your hand. The middle men are parasites, and feed only parasites.
There are levels of intimacy and defense, many different levels in even one sentence. Part of you draws near, part of you draws far, and this is dance. You can easily slap your friend’s face with a tone of voice, whatever your words may be.
Some people shake secret handshakes. We all shake secret handshakes through the lines our eyes make when we appraise another, to the verbal and physical gestures we speak to others. You could begin a best friend life long intimacy overnight, merely be recognizing in another the person you already loved your whole life.
The truest duty and highest nobility is in this dictum: take care of your own. Jesus said, “Taxpayers love taxpayers, and so that is no impressive thing, but you must be better than them in that you also love your enemies.” Hateful word. There are no end of mouths that would eat the bread from my hand. But if I feed the men and women who are after my heart, if I feed my own, if I write for my own, if I pour my heart into writing books that will never be bestsellers, merely to touch the tender folk I call my own, than I am happy and good and perfect. And you covet the dollar in my back pocket? Parasite!
Communism works when the communes are small and intimate. Communism for the families and friends, but capitolism for the nations and the WorldNation. Socialism is the compromise disease: touch it nothing.
Whatever our life, we are only intimate for seconds. Touches of intimacy determine long moods. Like a microexpession, we see it for a second, and that is all.
If you seek friendship for the sake of friendship, you will fail. Like happiness, friendship must be a means.
Freedom. Love and truth do not make you free. You must be free without love and truth, free in any circumstance, for freedom is a state of self power, without habit, without discipline.
Happiness leads to health and virtue. Virtue and health will not make you happy. Your I himself must be free, and your freedom will set your truth. The greatest virtue of the I is simply independence, which means, not a virtue, not a habit, but a distinct lack of habit, lack of virtue, a great free naked expanse around the consciousness.
Happiness and joy live only in a free I. Unfreedom is the feeling of pain.
Love and truth require the existence and participation of things beyond our control. They themselves are not the source of happiness, they are the objects of happiness. Only a free I can unsure joy in all situations.
There are two places a person is not free: in the classroom and in the bedroom. Truth and love are not freedoms, although true love and love of truth presuppose a freedom. That freedom, to be truly free, most not need the truth or the love to exist.
So far I have hinted at the Either / And construction. We have a few logical constructions to work with.
Either X and not Y, or Y and not X
Both X and Y, or Neither X nor Y
Either X (made up of some Y), or Y (made up of some X)
Then X, now Y (the oscillating bipolar)
The logical formulas allow a range of possibilities; what we take as the standard binary will go a long way in determining the style of our system, and possibly the style of our relationships.
Either / and is derived from the last of the formulas up there. The either/or, both/neither orientations form a quaternity:
| Both | X | Y | Neither |
The difference of Either/and is that it implies an underunity of terms—a monism. Either this and that, or either that and this; the hierarchy is maintained: either a man or a woman, but a man is partly a woman, and a woman partly a man; as is graphized in the Yin Yang.
X – X(Y) –XY – Y(X) – Y
What appears opposed in a binary is the pain of juxtoposing two stages of a chain as if these two were all, and were antagonistic.
Literature is time, logos is space. Read any fiction and it is about a plot in time, read any diction and it is a structure in space. As all abstract ideas project from an underimage, so, really, all dictional facts can be graphed and mapped. They hang in space.
Take your catalogs of notes, which look like passages from Pascal’s Pensees, and ever knit them together into essays. That is what I do with these notes: they start out as fragments, and every few days I integrate them into essays or essays I have already started. Reintegration and constant editing help me fully think and rethink my ideas.
The high mark of philosophy? Aristotle. And Aquinas. Comprehensive systems rather than isolated truths. Truths tend to singularity, whereas beauty tends to wholeness.
Truth than is a logical handling of the feeling-sense of ideas. Inwards. Beauty is love is communication. A woman is beautiful only to communicate to herself and others that she is healthy. We love beauty for it is lovely, loveable, and makes all of life lovely and loveable. Beauty is in all things, more in some than others, and the only limit of beauty in the eye of the beholder is his ability to see it. Where beauty is seen, beauty really is. And all beauty is a form of communication, for beauty seeks above all to be desired and to desire, to commune, to unite together.
All is one, but not only one. All is many and not only many. Everything is one and everything is many, at the same time, in different senses.
Art is the artifact meant for contemplation. One understands and comprehends a truth, but is comprehended by a beauty when he contemplates her. No man creates art to be destroyed; or if he did, it would be artifact and not art.
And so the two we see in so many forms come to us in the very work you hold. You ask: philosophy or literature? Philosophy is a spatial system, but a purely abstract idea map would be disappointing. For all memories are recorded as stories; abstractions to are true but not wise until they are made beautiful through story. Any great philosopher talks only of ideas, and always the same ideas, and does not simply define and heirchize all his terms, but tells the story of the hero idea, as it grows to become definite and integrated into the system. The critique of Kant is the same book as the epic of Giglamesh. They are structurally the same, if you know how to use metaphor to gain a generalized overview. All books are the same book. Every book the same book, if only you know how to read it. You must be able to state each part and the whole thing in its most abstract terms, and them move into the love of details, the feeling of suspense and excitement, that is the loveliness of narrative.
Power is based on fear, but good fear, and the song of power is laughter, the letting go of worry. The song of love is tears, the letting go of desire. When love attempts to be power, she is passionate, and when power attempts to be love he is freedom.
Power acts direct to achieve an indirection, a line becoming a circle; love is an indirection to achieve a direction, a circle becoming a line. Pure circles and pure lines are the horror of mankind. A woman, whose body is the embodiment of love, is all curves, and expresses desires by twisting her body, jutting her breasts and hips, arching her back, glancing out the sides of her eyes, and demuring, hinting, pushing away, letting love close slowly and by much difficulty: she is indirect to gain a direct intimacy. A man in love looks directly at his woman, moves violently but gently to seduce her, is nothing but lines and edges, as his tail is a long of desire, and her hole a round hand of pleasure. Power as pride as nobility as courage, is to achieve peace, peace and war are the same being, and to seek that stasis he must attack directly, violence. His means is the arrow, but his desire is the laurel.
The Laurel herself is the frigid woman overcome by the passionate man and so willing to transform her loveliness into wooden emptiness: Apollo loved more, and takes her body and twists it into a wreath of victory.
A woman twists and postures to make herself desirable, bends and pouts, flashes a quick glance and bows her head, but the angry masculine woman who does not do these things because they don’t work on men for some reason, not because she is ugly in body, as she angrily fears, but because she is ugly in soul, because she wants power and not love. A glaring woman is a gross thing.
So the victory of the lauren was not the rape of the nympth, but that she gave up her love to escape his passion; thus his lust became ambition, and the olympic games were born. In such a game, men do not need a willing partner, and must not request love. A woman is not passionate as a man, for she is too divided and multifold. She controls the passion of the man by requesting and nagging him in a thousand different directions, so that his concentration is lost. Woman as web.
The child at two and three wishes to rip the mother into pieces – this is the logic behind the tantrum. No man can talk a woman into loving him. If anything, she will love the attempt, but never the reasons. And a woman who is done with a man can never be dissuaded by any reasons. A man, strangely enough, can be reasoned back into love by mere arguments. He will realize he did love her and was blinding himself.
Love is circular and seeks to become linear. Love is beauty, is love of beauty, and beauty is the vision of health. Health is in equilibrium, not growth, in stasis. Power is linear and seeks to be circular, to become immortal. For love is death, and only mortals love, and especially the eternal mortals, but power seeks immortality, to end the violence by becoming crystallized as important. Immortal fame, immortal honor, to quit the fight and retire.
Pure power is dominance over the other, whereas pure love is enjoyment of the other. Nurture is an act of love, wheras control is an act of power.
It is impossible for an anxious man to love, and the great loneliness of all rejects, loners, and intellectuals is not that they are unworthy of love, but each is anxious about love. The man who feels something is different about him compared to other men has only one difference from them, and that is the feeling of difference itself. His emphasis on his difference makes all the difference. What makes a genius a genius is merely the firm conviction that he is one: the rest follows.
Love is an outflow to all the lovely beings. A man who is love is arrows of love towards all the lovers. Let him love as the sun: warm, distant, and without expectations. If he expects to be loved, and is not, as is always the case, then he will worry, and the worry worm is the fear that he is unlovely in the first place. The fear that I am unlovely makes me unlovely.
Contact is the goal of love, and yet, love can only sustain herself by continual cycling. Without a being loved, love dies. Therefore, the greatest lover of others must have a grand narcissistic primary love, to allow her to shine like the sun. She must lover herself for loving others, and not love only if loved by them.
Eros is the reciprical love, and pure Eros is the omnisexual love of all, no distinctions, complete union. Ultimately, this is merely the penultimate step of love, as the greatest love is not agape but Care, the chaos addition to eros, in which a system is imposed on love, distinctions are made, and borders are insisted upon. Sexual love is the highest love, but only the sexual love that knows a limit.
The enjoyment of love and the happiness of power are everything. All sufferings are made out of these feelings so as to allow the greatest joy and greatest happiness.
To insist on one word, one phrase, on formula is no power and no truth. Faith in words is from love and beauty. No poem is translatable, for the poetic of a poem is absolutely untranslatable: I never read a beauty in translation, have long since gifted all my translated poems. Poems are elegant lies. As lies, their shape is everything, their truth not worth knowing.
Ultimately, one must agree with the final vision of a philosopher for any of his reasons or arguments to resonate. The postmoderns realing over the supposed meaningless world wars, and meaningless everything, is all out of fashion to us, because we know what meaning is, and how everything they call meaningless has a meaning and place in our vision of the world. Doubt itself is a tool for gaining certainty; therefore a perpetual doubt would no longer be doubt at all, but mere anxiety that intellectualizes. Whenever another says “this one image explains all the rest,” we dismiss it. We prefer an image of the All, a sense of the All, and not some small pain as window to his nightmare.
Power is no bogy to us. In Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, the playful ring of the Hobbit is transformed by him into the body of Sauran, a comic book evil, as the Token of ultimate evil – power apparently is evil – which must be destroyed at all costs. Power is presented as an ultimate seduction, though of the people in my life I have never seen anything but laziness, irresponsibility, and entertainment as seduction. Is this how an Englishman views power? Or a Christian? Anyway, the ultimate fate of the greatest power in the universe is put appropriately in the hands of the least ambitious race in the Lord of the Rings, the peasant folk, big furry do-nothing but smoke pipes, the hobbits, who care for nothing than a few material comforts. The Hobbit itself presented the adventure of weak, unambitious, round in the belly hobbit who has made into an adventurer despite himself. Whatever his obsession with German religions and myths, he remains English – utilitarian, fearful, and the latest race to conquer the world and keep it that way (what language are we speaking now, for that matter?)
So these unambitious hobbits, coupled with an opium junkie (the corrupted hobit Golem), go through a miserable set of adventures, totally unlike the Hobit, and themselves are corrupted by ultimate power, not because power is seductive – there isn’t enough sex to it! – but because of some narcotic effect of the ring itself, like a heroin addiction. Poor plotting, but it is no more than allegory. So the hobbits do not melt the ring. Instead, pure chance, the least ambitious diety of all, leads the ring into falling to his doom. The world is saved, the hobbits undone, nobody worthy is left standing, but then, evil power is vanquished too. The meek inherit the earth only when the earth is no longer worth fighting for.
I can have my cake and eat it to if I do not eat the whole cake at once. Also, cake is inexpensive, and buying more and more cake is ever an option. Nor can I have my cake if I don’t eat it. Better would it be said that I can’t have my cake and my svelte build as well. So we want power and love. But a balance. Do not be impaled on the cross/stake of an either/or. All and nothing less.
Of course, power and love. The power to do and the love to adore. All hail the greatest power, for how can power be a temptation when it takes power to resist temptation? How can power corrupt when it takes power to remain integrated? How can power be abused when it takes power to be noble? And love for all, but mostly those few we have drawn close. All hail power! All hail love! The eternal two needs of man.
Study the Greeks! Study the Romans! They are the world. Greeks defined love, Romans defined power, and there has never been love on earth like Greek love, nor power on earth like Roman power.
As Sauran – and what other character could I be, other than Malkor – and I mean the pure type of these Gods, and not the corrupted misrepresentations of them, I insist on a ring of power even still: one world government, and one not by exclusions, but ultimate inclusion, heirarchization, and subdivision of balanced powers. Power as the line aims ultimately to become the loop, for perpetual peace. The “eternal boot to the face” makes no sense as in image of the desire of power. Again, we must ask a fearful Englishman! The white race are the most fearful, and therefore the most powerful. All in all we must assert and affirm them all!
No man wants omnipotence – not even a god could handle it, because it is too much work and not even sex. No man could be fulfilled but ultimate control. Imagine again the me-universe in which you and your whim control eveything in the universe. How long would your whim-verse last before you went crazy?
Fear as anxiety is the opposite of sex and orgasm. Make distinctions between tensions. We must imagine the recursive Tao. The yin yang surrounded by a black line and engulfed in the black of a bigger yin yang, forever.
A few archimedian points of absolute consisteny are all we need. “Every day I always do X” and a little more. The world needs a few absolutes, even if they are stupid and pointless, the ultimate things we can count on, merely as anchors, not from love.
My ego poors like water – or like the love of an ameba, over all things, with a surface full of fingers, to try and place everything.
Rhetoric is love, circular like love in order to be direct. Logos is naming, is linear. We cannot seize love from another person. Love no matter how it wants direct full intimate contact relies ultimately on the love of the beloeved. Only power is direct, in order to normalize an indirection around a fear. Love circles her have and seeks to point outwards. Power wishes to keep a firm route around a feared thing.
A well fed dog knows no gratitude. A love starved man eats himself sick and falls away disillusiones. Keep your pets and lovers slightly hungry.
Narcissus did not love his image, but himself, as we all should. He did not know there are better ways to love oneself then to stare into a reflection.
Love is of concrete objects, truth is of abstract, but a similar freedom and passion for both.
Hate has no power in itself, just as love has no power. They are affects only, with no control. Hate grows from love, has no soil but love, is love, and the deeper into a man you descend the more you find yourself surrounded by not hing but pure love. Hate is the skin of all loves, and every love has a slight skin of hate. With utter initmacy ther is only love. Hate is always an intimacy gone wrong, prematurely pressed or withdrawn. Hate is love with bad timing.
Our deepest fantasies, by which I mean, the shapes needs take, and not the day dreams that we impart imagine through will, give us a clue not of our deepest needs, but perhaps the opposite of them, some extreme expression of them, deliberately fearsome to keep them under long enough to find plausible applications. The under craves pain, and painful images, but the over mind, the I revels only in beauty. What do we see about fantasies and daydreams?
The clearest daydreams and fantasies are a step beyond reality. I may dream that my boss calls me and says I can come into work an hour later – I can sleep in! – or imagine that the store had to be closed for the day, or whatever else.
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