The muse has ceased to sing over the Tetramatrix for now. She will regain her breath and prepare for another bout. I present the essay in his half way phase:
Daniel
Tetramatrix
| HEAD | HANDS |
| HEART | LIPS |
Man acts in four ways: feeling, thinking, saying, doing. They stand for the four learned human faculties: attitude, belief, personality, and character. Hence, there are four habits he can instate through these. What is the understructure of these four, what does the systeme of four behaviors imply, and how can we make use of this system?
As habits, these four are felt as impulses and are willed through mind. The organic order of habit moves feeling into thought, thought expressed into words, and words to prepare actions. It moves ever outward, relating to the world. In example: I feel hungry, I think of food, I express this desire, and I act to eat. Habits are conservative: the impulse flows through four forms, with one need beneath.
The understructure here is double. The head and heart correspond to the inner, the hands and lips to the outer, and the head and hands correspond to the specific, whereas the heart and lips correspond to the general. A feeling in its broadest is a mood. To address a problem, a mood calls forth a set of thinking habits. Thus, a mood is the lab table which situates the equipment. Likewise, the lips call the stage, orchestrating other people into comprehension and cooperation. Both heart and lips are generalizers, requiring interpretation. Thoughts are definite, actions are concrete. An action is irrefutable; words confusable, thoughts definite, and feelings flux.
Thus we tend to view the head and hands as the “hard” and heart and lips the “soft.” Hard uses logic. soft, emotion; hard get things done, soft talk about it;—so the archetypes go. Indeed, water/feelings and wind/words are things that surround us in ambience, like a fetus in his element: do not the mythemes explain all this? The fire/thought, and hands/earth apply to specific active forces, do they not?
Or should we call the passions fire, thoughts wind, actions earth, and words rivers?
Let’s complicate and enrich our four terms to form a tapestry. Since there are four types of activity, there will be four types of people, categorized by which activity they emphasize: the saint, the philosopher, the poet, and the hero.
[
Hero is earth and poet is heaven; the inner heaven is the black of saint, the inner earth is the white of mind. The hero feels, the philosopher sees, the poet hears, the saint, burns.
The hero will never be found without his blade of atheism. Look afresh.
The philosopher of mind breaks ideas down: Sword, scissors, analysis, shining, demon—science.
The poet of creativity combines ideas: Arms, artifice, ardour—art.
` Everything is two except the center. In the harmony of pheres, the outermost contains, but the innrmose supports.
| Feel | Think | Say | Do |
| saint | philosopher | poet | hero |
| fire | air | water | earth |
| | | | |
Saint
The Saint is he who feels. And since the heart is what feels, and specifically, the hormones and fluids the heart pumps, the heart is the soul, the salted sea, as again the brain with his waves is moved by salted electrolytes, a dual ocean of blood and nerve. The saint is the blood. He is a connoisseur of emotions, disdaining mere pleasures, which he associates with the body. He is concerned with the voluptuousness of guilt, perhaps, or what other mysteries lie inwards. Ascetics are heart based—mystical experiences matter most. Mysticism is his epistemology; the important is what feels deepest or highest (the terms in no way negate each other). Thus we have the priest, the mother, the passive. Why passive? Of all the impulses, the heart is the most difficult to will. I can will myself to do kindness, to do work, to think of any topic, to say any conceivable truth or lie—but I cannot force myself to feel it. Or so it seems.
Heart is habit as much as the others. Though initially instinctual, it learns from human assumptions as much as any other habit. One must merely learn the love handles to control the heart.
What is ethical for the saint? Emerson wrote “Nothing is at last sacred but the the integrity of my own mind,” in distinction to the suppsed sacredness of church and Bible—but he spoke more of intuition than mind proper. The opposite feeling “my heart and mind are fully evil” mean exactly the same thing. It means this: my heart, right or wrong, is my central project. What is right for a mystic is what is moral, what feels right—the terms “conscience” and “temptation”—take supernatural flavor here, and in fact, the supernatural is derived from the oceanic nature of the heart, and can have no reality or external existence apart from it.
A saint is entirely passive. If he acts in the world, this is obedience. Whatever the case, he is introverted, and desires to escape the world.
But lest we religionize this type too much, let us broaden the category. The saint is the mystic, the romantic, the faithful. A drug user is essentially of this category—he is concerned with mystical experiences of the more accessible kind.
The saint is history based, is interested in reexperiencing his own memories, and studying the mystical experiences of others (as recorded in Bibles and Scriptures.) It is not a study of the universal, per se, but of the nonrepeatable, and thus of constantly novel experiences. The great mystical ages were ages of myth and proto-religions (religions without the theology), as of the Greeks, the Eddas, parts of the Hebrew Bible, and before that, the mythos of every known people of the world. Or as the baby begins: focused on the humming blur, and murmuring “dada.”
The saint desires. He is voluptuous, and uses this libido to scourge himself with guilt, to unify with God in a sexual metaphor, or to fall in love with a woman. What he wants most from the earth is intimacy. Compassion is his standard of goodness, but more so is sanctity.
The Saint submits to his heart, let’s the passion overwhelm him, and submits to an external agent—God, Spirit, fasting, Nirvana, whatever—merley as proxy, as an external symbol of will which acts as a stronger will than his own only because it is external and therefore nonvolitional. God here is akin to the bed of nails.
The Submission to the act of God -- the externalizing, omnipoting of God -- is only a gesture of weakining the mind’s will in order to let the heart flow more freely. The heart evokes God, masquarades as God, puts Faith in God only in order to bind reason, to remove limitations. The feeling of infinity, eternality, or, in a word, limitlessness, is the natural feeling of the heart when the heart is not held in the hands of reason. Reason is always the limited, the defined, the tool, the handleable. But to fully enjoy a passion you must not control it, for God will die in your hand, the cherub falls ill, you are left with a passive rather than a passionate heart.
Few people realize how temporary, how fragile God is, how he may easily be killed off, and so the theologians must define him, logize him, make him a mental reality, when God is absurd, unreasonable, illogical, impossible—is not even in the dimension of assumptions, of logical experience at all, but is only felt, felt in a way that the word God is a poor mean thing, felt in such an exstasy that all we can say is I AM HE. This the mystic knows, and if he is wise, he will keep to himself. Poets advertise. Poets live by whoring their private joys. A poet is a sold out mystic.
The traditional saints, monks, ascetics, the world over hide away in monestaries and private cells to block temptation. These are the weakest of the saints, and should be respected as men who know their limitations. The greatest Saints live among men, but invisible, never to make a sermon or offer any advice, but by mere presense and power of gesture, they perfect a city and make it it holy. Such men do not dress different, nor would you ever be able to describe such a saint as to typify him and point him out. He sees you directly, but when you see him you see something holy within yourself, and forget about him altogether.
The fake holy men are “a people set apart” with shaven head, wooden bowl, flaccid penis, distinctive diet, sacred books, inherited distinctions – believe none of it. The Great sacred man does not come upon the herald of a prophet, for his will is God, and God cares never to announce himself. You speak to this man and recognize the eternity of his eyes, the inevitiabilty of everything he does, and yet you never think to quote some book or tradition. He is like the angel that took the form of a wounded mouse upon your doorstep, but instead of bringing forth your care, he baits you to dare.
The Saint who uses his mind is femine in that he sorts the inner. The hero who uses his words to explain his actions is the male who sorts the outer. Thus, a woman fantasizes stories, but a man fantasizes only images.
Whereas the saint is informed through the mystical, the philosopher is informed through the rational. He is not concerned with morals, but principles. He is not interested in the past, but in the eternal. He is the man of thought.
Thought is reified feeling. From the body and the needs we experience, and through active reasoning, we categorize experience into definitions. The philosopher knows the supreme joy of defining, of controlling concepts. For the philosopher is more active than the mystic. The philosopher doubts, active, whereas the mystic feels, passive. The philosopher is active minded, specific, and defined by what he believes and knows, not, as the mystic, by his attitude.
From the world, he seeks education. His final concern is truth. He too is an introvert, and wishes to achieve truth rather then to apply it. And, being an introvert like the saint, he is concerned with self discipline, rather than power.
Logic is his tool for doubting—half his mind. He is ratiocreative, able to synthesize systems and definitions, and also to test them with doubts.
Reader, my love is for you—draw close! You lips blossom like a rose.
The mundus mundi, the world that is my heart, evokes a world to intensify my heart. When I’m in a mood, the whole world conspires to intensify that mood. Rude customers materialize when you are having a bad day to begin with.
The language of the Saint is music; the philosopher math and diagram, the poet poetry, and the hero technology.
The saint says “the way that can be named is not the eternal way,” or “any God you call God is not the true God.” Let’s explore this diagrammatically.
Music intensifies and stabalizes feelings: the saint will always praise “peace of mind, sabbath of soul” as the greatest good: for him it is. He is akin to the hero who dances, only the saint dances not at all, would rather sit and pray, sit and breath. A Saint presupposed one who is the “greatest of sinners”—an anarchic heart. As it is said: the greater the beginning chaos, the greater the final order.
All music we hear, comprehend, and assume, becomes part of the one song of our soul. Everything we hear is harmonized into the one song. This song is in the pattern of our brain waves, in the ebb and flow of our hormones, in the thumping of our heart and the bellowing of our lungs. And below the music is the womb of chaos – a creative void held sacred by the real and universal madness in all men.
The poet is most saintly when he emphasizes music: metre, rhythm, pitch, volume, vowal length, tone – babes and odes get this.
Dionysus is a poet – Plato no. The Trageydians, the Diathryambics, were possible because there thrived manic, intoxicated, God-filled sex priests under the love and inspiration of Dionysus. Dionysus is twice born, and yet stands for the unity of life, the melding of opposites. There may be love plagues from Venus in her Venereal disease, and sun-plagues from Apollo for the transgression of borders, but the Dynosian plague is different. Even Hermes, who transgresses borders does not deny that the borders exist. Dionysus alone could melt borders.
I wish men would listen to their words when they wrote, and imagine their nouns when they mapped them. Indulge your senses. Walk enveloped in mind, like Neo in the Matrix – hallucinate! Layer the world in intepretations. You must see the metaphors around you, put them there, and you must metaphorize always.
My own writing is a threefold braid: power, play, mania. Or again: fury, wit, and crazy. When I start to lack one of these – when I lose my sense of humor – I come to regret my moods. When I yet have it, I am always safe.
Perhaps I lack only the godlen fourth: long, patient, balanced, and meticulous scholarship.
Psychotic eyes open when the metaphor mind replaces the emperical.
The undersong sings the language of our feelings through the cycles of hormones into our blood and brain. The rhythm of our life is based on heart (soul) and breath (spirit) and the mingling there-between. These are literal, as in the actual oxygen and adrenaline in our blood, and they are metaphorical, as in the breath of life and vigor that embed in our matter.
Speech is the domain of the poet, and to a lesser extent the philosopher. A saint doesn’t think in words, and if he hears the word of God, it is only when he reasons and rationalizes nothing at all, but lets an assumption transform into the heart of music.
The memories are akin to the feelings -- primary and direct, whereas thinking and saying are akin to assumptions -- abstracted from the former.
When an assumption becomes a habit, a directive, it must pass through the bottom of the ocean as a bubble to heaven, and maintains the scent of ocean, the heart. A memory sublimates into the heaven of assumption, a heaven that must again pass through the hell of heart to arrive at the second heaven of mind.
In the stream of consciousness, habit pulls assumptions into the mind; mood summons certain assumptions.
Only those who have not seen God have faith in him. And having seen God and greater things, the philosopher doesn’t bow.
Music intensifies and stabalizes a mood. It emphasizes it but also takes away the pain by the calm of purity. Hope is too painful as verging on fear. Music is a normalizer.
The experience of the saint is the experience of the Mystic. It must be prepared for by cleanliness – and in this Nietzsche is among our best examples of a mystic. Before you meditate, clean, organize, structure and structurate.
The mystical experience is set apart because it is
1. Private – you feel it inwards, usually when alone, perhaps alone in nature.
2. Important – you feel it is absolutely relavent experience which you should leave yourself open to feeling again, which you will in the meantime interpret.
3. Certain – the mystical feeling itself is made out of a sense of great certainty. Since “God” in his deepest and most positive sense is a name for Importance, this certainty is the power of importance.
4. Ineffible – the experience is deep and supports no dogma whatsoever. It cannot be spoken. The poetry and dogmas that arise from it are merely the filling of ditches that you dug from your studies before.
Mysticism is a mental illness, forming the oppurtunity of a mental imbalance. When the mind is adjusting its assumptions, we normally laugh or cry, the emotions of transition; when the mind is adusting its assumptions in a profound way, we feel epiphany.
Our studies, our speculations, our immersion in religious dogmas are the digging of ditches, dry and painful. The mystical punctures into the the Musical Under of the heart, which again touches the Mythic of the memories – in other words, it is the broaching of a new river from the sun stream of needs. The feeling of strong certainty pours into the ditches, and crystallizes their shores. But you must descend into the primary music, you must touch primary experience of immediate memory. This is the mystic, and the saint knows best this art.
| Apathy Anger Fear Sadness Emptiness pain | Coldness Lust Love Warmth Fulnness pleasure |
| V HAPPINESS | |
The interpretive of the Saint is ever his own heart. Perhaps he knows, perhaps not, that every experience of every reality, divine or mundane, fleshly or heavenly, is really only his body and soul reacting within themselves, and all other things and all fine words matter nothing more than mirros back on his very self.
The heart cusp, as abbreviated above, the “saint’s nimbus,” diagrams the full felt heart of every moment: that we feel at any moment, not one thing, not a few things, but all things, the full heart, the heart reacting to this, feel this now, and all things towards it. The innermost of man is happiness, the speech of needs is pain and pleasure, and once pain and pleasure are mixed with the impulse of desire, we feel love and fear, and all the graded and intermixed modes derived from love and fear. Coldness is a form of love, is a lid put on love to prevent foolishness, just as apathy is the lid of fear, and where apathy is expressed, a great fear is hidden, and were coldness is expressed, a deep lust, love, warmth, and fullness threatens from within. We feel the full heart, yet according the the intimate words we can speak, we sing deeper or farther from the heart. A lover can bring his beloved to the right level of heart, merely by the whisper and cadence of his voice, to the right place in her heart, though the rest of her heart haunts the background.
Philosopher
“Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.”
Emerson: Journal, August 1847
Whereas the saint is characterized by desire, the philosopher is characterized by joy. The philosopher is the mind, and the mind is the nonextendable absolute—or more precisely, the experience of a nonextendable absolute.
Philosophy seeks the indubitable and the insoluble, for the insoluble becomes our wall of safety. Mind is object, heart is subject, and will above them both is the projector.
The poet is the butterfly: he who expresses. Where the saint learns by mystic intuition, and the rationalist learns by rationalism, the poet learns by intercourse, by schooling, by scholarship. The saint is in attitude, the philosopher belief, the scholar charisma. The poet isn’t concerned primarily with being right, but speaking well. He wants to relate to others. The love of the saint, the truth of the philosopher, matter less to the poet than the beauty of relationship. Thus a friendship is more important to him than romance.
The philosopher is a thinker, and as such, his mind is logical. Normal thinker is symbolical, rather, poetical, as the “stream of conscious” is a stream of poetry, but thinking as reason, as a discipline, is a matter of formal and exact use of signs, of defining and logifying. Yet the symbol of the piet touches these.. It is as if each symbol were a piano key, striking a heart string of feelings, with a dozen experiences for overtones. Or perhaps like a single millipede walking on a thousand affects. The Saint touches the fire, unable to see anything except fire; he worships sun and candle. The philosopher sees by the fire, but for is only useful to shine light on other things. He wishes to try things by fire, as Heraclitus said: “Fire proves all things, and reproves some.”
The philosopher converses with ideas, and so he is the idealist, whereas the hero is the factual, the pragmatist. The idealist believes his truths because they make an economical, simple and sophisticated whole, and if reality doesn’t flesh them out, so much the worse for external reality.
Philosophy is not regular thought, which dips in and out of philosophy, as a river with waves into the air, for philosphy is refined, is air, is logos, is, therefore, the ever symbolic Hermes, who transmutes all things into signs and thus controls them.
Science and technology are cognate: science a technology of thinking, the technology a science of acting. All actions create things, arms bring them together into artifice, into art. We have the scissors of mind and we have the arms that handle them.
But alas, this mystical stacking of symbols is not philosophical because the saint believes and beloves images, whereas the philosopher does not belove nor believe any symbol, but doubts, ponders, and above all is cynical, skeptical, careful, and wary – and these in the best sense of the words – and is also speculative, rigorous, logic-chopping, hair-splitting, and difficult – and these again in the best sense.
The philosopher is of two registers. He speaks in defined words until he can create an image, and this by a rigorous program called reason. Or he starts with an image, and seeks out the words to justify it, and that another type of program called rationalization.
The habits of the mind, of which the philosopher is foremost, are thinking in images, and literalistic words. Indeed, the genuis is the man most fluid moving between images and words. For those teetering on the cliff of genius, the rim of insanity, this fluidity is too much, as if they were already on the ship of folly, pure unconscious intermixing like a Dionysian wine. I speak of two extermes: the schizophrenic/manic on the left hand, and the autistic on the right. An autistic, if he does not discipline himself, will flow from image to image, a fluid proteus between ideas, random associations carry him to a thousand childhood memories. The images themselves may not be as fluid as the metaphorical mind (a dip into the emotional which autistics flounder upon). Philosopoets move from image tone to image tone, feeling the undersence in the metaphorical mind, but never softening the image itself. To be able to soften an image, into a sort of half-alive Platonic pure form – this is exactly what Aristotle called the true mark of genius. This unfocuses the inner eye to blur the image, and then evokes another image and blurs it as well, until they are sufficiently blurry to be equal, and suddenly we say with enlightenment: “the globe of earth is an apple!”
The manic man and schizophrenic man get their kicks from blurring words together. In some cases, they can actually hear a vowal shift, such that, “Get away, so help me!” becomes “God a wise sell ma” or some other weirdness, which, with the poetic ability to pun every word and particle of a word, contain worlds of hidden meetings, so much so that my manic friend laughed at the spammers who sent him junk mail because, as he said, “They are just throwing around the deepest ideas and not even copy righting them.”
But technically, this is poetic thinking, and the manic is the poet.
The philosopher, on the other hand, does not think poetry. He intersets in crystal images, and used words only and ever to vault over an abyss towards another image. Yet the philosoper is not autistic, because he prefers to smash specific images together within partical accelarators, and believes in, speaks, and loves, only the most abstracted meanings. Let us say that a man grabs an apple. The apple is experience, is passion, is mystic. How unphilosophical. The philosopher balancess his hand on the apple in such a way as he would balance a glass on the back of his hand. The accomlished philosopher can balance the glass while supporting his fingers upon a mere apple seed, and the master philosopher can support the glass of wisdom on an open hand pressing down on five separate seeds.
The autistic, then, will be our hero, because for her, ideas stand for tangibles, and so she throws herself like an arrow into the bullseye: she is the pragmatist: what she thinks must be, and if it is not, she could not think it.
The habits of the mind are not the mind. The streams of consciousness are symbolized by water, but mind itself is not water. Mind is force of focus, a willful and selective gravity. As Emerson says of good writing: “Omit not your own intention.” And again “Good writing and brilliant conversation are perpetual allegories,” as indeed they are: each clause must have eight levels of meaning. And he knew that all of nature is an allegory for the will itself, that will is the most real thing in the universe, and yet, not the deepest, for the deepest is need (ultimately, each man’s need is his name). All of nature is allegory for willful focus, and yet all willful focus is centered on need, which shines focusing power out, and pulls selecting energy in.
This image was explored with fanfare in the Corpus Hermetica, in which the supreme image of insight was a vision of a flame surrounded by a power, and the power slowing the flame until it was absolutely still as a full flame. To explain would vitiate the effect.
For the spontaneous power must equal the assimilating power. You must make from your own substance, as a spider does, you must make with assimilated substances, as the ant does, but you must do both, Bacon says, as the honey bee: mingling self and other. Or as Goethe said, “What is genius but the faculty of seeing and turning to account everyhing that strikes us.” Utter openness of mind would corrupt if it were not limited by critical selection.
Poet
As the saint stands for memory and experience, the poet stands for assumption and language.
The word for the poet is beauty, the pleasing sensual arrangement. The surest way to get a poet to change his behavior is not to quote morals or principles, but to present a better aesthetic whole. If you would reform him into a better world picture, he will be pleased to fit into it at any cost.
The poet, as a man of air, is spirit, as even the written words are still mostly air.
He doesn’t feel desire and joy, so much as flow and place. Nor is he focused on the past or the eternal, as the saint and philosopher are, but upon the future.
Art is the orientor of attitude: this connects expressions and impressions, art and heart.
The poet is the speaker, and thus stands for personality.
Personality is a construction of verbal engines. Language engines, the speaking habits, make the personality. Even when we are alone, we are not alone with our self, but friends with our persona-for ourself.
No man is miserable, or stupid, or ridiculous, only he is caught in his own world. If you want to make him great with your ideas, to shine your light on him, you must learn his language. His language, his ideas, the images that move him, the concepts by which he thinks, need to be learned like any foreign language.
The poet, as personality, is created eternal, constructed immortal. When he touches into history, he moves in two directions: backwards to make way for his existence, and forwards to sustain it.
Study Buddha, Hamlet, Jesus, Wotan, Don Quixote.
Nothing can come out of the artist that is not in the man. The greatest creation of the poet, if a poet arises who can bring it, is to give mankind an infinite onion, a complex symbolic work of such perfection and density that it can be infintely opened like layer so crystal into a fine inwards lens.
Emerson was poet in that his foundational passion was writing, his ambition no less than to “write the Bible of my age” as a replacement for the Hebrew and Greek Bibles, a vision he chose at 21 and held to the end. In this he read Montaign, Plutarch, Plotinus, Goethe, De Steer, and Wordsworth religiously, claiming that without such a daily reading he would have “no daily substance” – nor could he conceive a good man who was not a great reader. He only read books which reported first hand experience – theology and commentaries were straight wrong. Likewise, he read only what “prophesized his own life,” and fed his own writings.
Emerson called poetry “the gai science,” after the troubadors. The poet is the grace of transitions. Let life be utterly chaotic – it only seems so by jars of jerky transitions. Smooth all these transitions into the smooth grace of inevitable symmetry, and the world will be symphony, come what may.
The poet is water, for water desires water, and feeds all life. And so the goddess of poetry is Sophia, Wisdom herself, who is not quite logical philosophy, but merely the idol of logical philosophers.
He reads not to be inspired, but to save time and take up worthy works that send him further in his own direction.
The love of the poet is to use his mind expressively. Mind is symbol, and always a symbol haloed in voice. Whenever we think any idea, somewhere in our conscious or subconscious is the shape of the projector of it; we see somewhere in our mind image of the idea, and around that hear the voice of the idea: no thinking exists without both voice and image (or their corralaries), and insofar as we do not directly experience them, we nevertheless indirectly experience them.
Most people think in sentence fragments accompanied by dim images. This loose thinking allows for a quick flow of thought. To think complete sentences and exact images is slow, clumsy, and wasteful. Autistic people think in visual images, but since they do not bridge unlike images with words, the image itself must summon a similar image (voice is a means of jumping through abstraction before alighting on an another image). A successful autistic will convert abstractions into symbols, so she can use them to leap; some autistic people cannot steel themselves onwards without envisioning with a visual symbol what “onwards” looks like
As the saint knows, the universally loved music, aside from your own mother’s voice, sings from the brook, the river, the waterfall. These all stand in turn for conscious movement, the stream of consciousness. Fluid speech is never hated, is dear as love, as indeed, and as Darwin suspected, music itself evolved from mating calls, and love of complicated mating calls sought for the survival value of a complex and resourceful brain.
For this reason, the Greeks universally trained the freeborn in the guitar (lyre); Homer was not recited without it.
The writer uses nouns, verbs, emphasis and evaluation. As they say: show and tell, describe and evaluate.
The founders of religions, and the writer’s of all scriptures, are poets, never saints. They ransack, steal, break down, revile, and hate the saints. Their genius is marketing a set of documents, creating a word that will encaspulate a type of person, and instantiating this in a group practice.
The philosopher alone sees the big picture. A hero is no reformer without the big picture, for both the hero and the saint can get overly focused on a detail unworthy of such attention and worry. Augustine with his pears. He was obsessed with confessing and analyzing his theft of pears – though you think the saint would be more honest to his actual sins, of which pear theft was not even among them. By focusing on a nothing sin, he yet committed the greatest intellectual crimes in Christiandom. This is the nature of the hero too, who makes other men into villians (a villianous act itself) by bending the fate of the world to his obsession with one fine point. The philosopher alone sees the widest view of the world, history, and mankind. The poet instead focuses on instances of the whole, and is unique of all of them in capturing the whole in an instance. A single sonnet might capture his whole world. The poet does not see the whole, but knows how to see the whole through an instance. In this he is almost scientific. The poet is in fact scientific in that he knows how to analyze the instances by his vision of the whole.
The hero is the details man, a practical man of action, the most practical of all of them. But he mistakes himself when he ignores the big picture.
The poet jumps rope. The rope loops above the mind into language, and then below the mind into the “metaphor mind” of the heart – dodging completely the critical scissoring of the mind, so that poetry can be spoken in a trance – and the best poets know not what they do.
The poem itself is white light, the one light that contains all the others, for though music is called the purist art – its relation to the spoken word being ignored – poetry is the thickest art, and thus the representation of artifice alltogether: it is musical, it paints a picture in the imagination, it sculpts an image through line breaks, and unlike music, it is logical, metaphorical, and a form of philosophy. As philosophy is the prototype of all the sciences of learning, poetry is the prototype not only of all the arts, but as well the prototype of philosophy itself, in its most sublime form, the sensual – indeed, all form is at last sensual.
Truth is not beauty, but truth does well to become beauty or it will hardly be received. Like a great “A,” the two start from different places, but meet for marriage in the heavens.
Hero
The body's duty
To say without the deed, one chews to spit,
But Bubble-Gum heroes waste their tongue
Time's bones will not be knit by deeds of lung,
For only blood in skin is worthy writ.
To feel without the deed one burns a corpse,
Or winds a rusted clock that will not tick,
For greatness breathes his spirit but to quick
The muscles wrestling wrenching hist'ries course.
The flame is for the engine’s flashing fight,
The say is for the world to flee the way,
The will is for teaching body flight,
The sun is for the time to know it's day.
In lust and blood and rays of mind the flesh
Must make the world and joy and day afresh.
The hero is the man of action. The saint learns by mysticism, the philosopher by rationalism, the poet by scholarship, the hero through empiricism. Thus the hero belongs to the age of science and technology—our age.
He is concerned not with morals, principles, or poetic justice, but justice proper, the law. He is active, and thus must control his own actions lest they break the law.
He might as the other have the right attitude, belief, and charisma, but he is focused on character—the integrity of actions. He is not concerned with love, truth, or relationship, so much as with achievement. Pride and honor delight him.
Mysticism studies the past in history, myth, and religion; philosophy studies the eternal, and builds sciences from it; the scholar studies art, language, people; but the hero studies business, power and growth. Thus he is active and hard—masculine—and not passive and sensitive. His central emotion is not desire, joy, nor flow, but passion.
The men who do the most good are the heroes who inspire us to become great. They lift not a finger for us, but do us more good than any mother’s love could.
The deed stands naked. Words cloth it. A hero without a tongue is called villian. If any hero in any story failed to justify his actions with words, lacked even a sympathetic bard to do so for him, he would appear to a villian, and indeed, he would be. The clothing makes the man—especially the words we cloth around our actions.
In the Icelandic Sagas, the heroes prize poetry best, and even the cruel Egil is redeemed for his poetry – in the Teutonic type, poetry comes from strength, expresses strength, is a power worthy of death, as even Wotan is willing to sacrifice himself to himself and gain the poetic powers of one who has gone beyond. For Northern Europe, heroes are poets.
Seeing the type pure teaches best. As the Saint is best seen in his ecstatic trance, the philosopher thinking in pure modal logic – math is not pure enough, but instead too abstract to mean anything on its own – the poet singing a poem, the hero is best seen – city building.
The hero is the pragmatist, the great practical thinker. For while the philosopher thinks perfecty crystalline thoughts of utterly structured abstractions, the hero must interpret all that into the already acting system of the world at hand. The hero as body stands best of all for Will, will acting against the great outer obstacle of the tangible world.
Wotan, therefore, is the hero’s God, and a hero. He is also a God of poetry, but he yet is the great Will, the fighter, the thruster. He makes Ash and Ivy, our ancient forebears, from carving wood – which means, theologically, that man was already grown out of the inanimate as a tree, in a natural state, but took his own God’s will to carve something better out of mankind.
The great Heroes strories of the West sing best from Homer and the Sagas – and of course everything Roman.
The hero wrestles against his parents – mother experience-shape, called WE, the city of immanent problems, using the most personal memories and carving them by philosophical storyboard, like a dream puzzle whose solution requires long lonely walks, and meditation – a dance with visual thinking to innovate – let the secret burst forth, catch omniscience off guard: six hours a day, ever attacking, taking every word your enemy breaths, and by contagion turning them a foul, turning struggle into music – repressed expressed till it blossoms like the milky way into a white wose – every energy pouring out as sublimation, the cave of socrates, the kingdom of Jesus, the eight folds of Buddha, the virtue of a heart that saves every treasure like a bank of gold – this the strong will braves and blazons by holding the harsh word and impossible horror in the dead center of focus till it is assimilated, normalized, regularized, and comprehended.
Precedence makes courage. And yet the philosopher interprets precedence from every corner, and is never caught naked, being clothed with thought. Conquer, knowing you inevitably will. Familiarize danger, prepare when you are at peace perpetually for more war. Be equal to ever problem. For the strengthening of the will is the object of our existence, as Emerson rightly said. The will parted from necessity, a bifurcation of freedom and necessity, so that freedom would become stronger. Every day surmount a fear. Every day create.
For art is embodied will. To inspire means always and only to direct actions through beauty. All art is meant to lead to beautiful lives. All words are mere preparation. As Wotan knew, wisdom is practical, and all philosophy, when it touches the world, becomes pragmatism.
The philosopher thinks in signs, logically, rigorously, like a dry breeze; the poet speaks fluid symbols, like a river of love; the hero acts out the poets story, in the drama of will in the world.
The hero loves to touch. A weak person, by his fear of touching, causes more harm when he does touch, for his finger is charged with anxiety. He wreakes havoc with his lack of self-trust. His anxiety and guilt make even his casual peck on the cheek a stab to the heart. The confident strong man, even when he attacks you, is strong enough to gentle away your resistence.
The hero is concrete: for him ideas stand for specific things, and specific things are what need doing. the Hero tests all his makings through his keen imagination, grasping the small details. In this he is not the philosopher, who omits details. An inability to think generally means that each specific image will evoke other specific images.
Most people think in dim images bridged with casual words. The hero thinks specifically, and for him, words stand for things he can measure by his handspan. He learns nouns best, and is wise like great technical thinkers who think rigidly, whose imagination is still imagation, but utterly controlled, like the master abucus users who can imagine an abacus, even with eyes open, and perform complex calculations by moving imagined beads.
The heroes mind is in his muscles. Wherase the poet is prosodic, seeking what the newborn can grasp: stress, pitch, emphasis, the hero is more western, patterned upon Odysseus, being a man of action, like later western verse, which is as linguistic as it is phonetic, beyond Homer’s intent.
All movement is dance, comes from a hundred-thousand years of evolved dancing and singing, and all language was first song. This returns us again to the saint, and indeed the hero is cognate with the saint over the philosopher. He feels. The hero is known for his heart courage and his brawn muscles. Hearing is emotional, seeing is logical, but acting is real.
The hero’s moment is called “the scene,” as all good movies and novels are a series of evocative scenes. The philosopher prefers syllogism and categories, the poet lines and stanzas.
The basis of all narrative is a thread, the yarn being told, a string of events, a plotline. The novel is an attenuated thread, usually with other threads interspliced for interest. The postmodern novel is a knotted ball. But in all, the basic plot is:
Hero wills, hero tries, obstacles resist, will resolves.
As treatise and narrative sum up the poles, treatise says “this IS that” whereas narrative says “this DOES that”
The hero, when he is inwards like a saint, survives by drawing a circle upon chaos, a ground of repetition from which to build eternity.
Therefore, tap into a tradition, a river in your genes, or a river in you nation, or religion where a torrent of pressure of a million minds incarnates into you. Everything the millions have felt they encoded into langauge, and you must merely break the crystals of language to let the fire out. The Saint is ill, the hero will. A hero enacts his feelings, and therefore strengthens them, digging riverbeds for his feelings to flow.
| Heart | Head | Lips | Hands |
| Feelings | Thinking | Saying | Doing |
| Mystic Saint Morals | Rationalist Philosopher Principles | Scholar Poet Beauty | Empiricist Hero Law |
| Priest Mother Passive--uncontrollable | | | Scientist Engineer Active |
| Desire | | | Passion |
| Eve life sex | | | Adam dust death |
| Passive / Sensitive | | | Active / Hard |
| Woman | Man | Woman | Man |
| General | Specific | General | Specific |
| Orienter | Executer | Orienter | Executer |
| Attitude | Belief | Charisma | Character |
| Romance | Education | Friendship | Living |
| Love | Truth | Relationship | Achievement |
| Kindness | Truth | Politics | Justice |
| Beauty | Industry | Beauty | Industry |
| Discipline | Discipline | Power | Power |
| Introvert | Introvert | Extrovert | Extrovert |
| temperance | Prudence | Justice | courage |
| History | Philosophy | Art | Business |
| Myth&religion | Philosophy | Art | Technology |
| Intimacy | Education | Beauty | Living |
| Love | Logic | Language | Life |
| Past | Eternal | Future | Present |
| Desire | Joy | Aesthetic | Passion |
Complications
Head and heart is introvert, lips and hands are extrovert—that is clear. What else? We have also discussed head and hands as definitive hard, words and feelings as comprehensive soft. The break down is clearer in the two forms of discourse: logos and literature. Logos is the logical, whereas literature is the beautiful. We will return to this in the section “Two is for Biword.”
The thinking / saying is the human. Feeling / doing is the animal. Thus the difference between the spiritual versus the physical.
You might not categorize yourself as any of these: a saint, a poet, a philosopher, a hero?—but fret nothing the archetypes. List your focuses.
We are all of these. We all feel, think, say, and do. Sometimes we may emphasize this or that, but we must daily perform all four. Indeed, the complete person, the Ololo, is all four in an artistic whole. And given that rounded completeness is essential, we negate none of them.
Focusing on emotions would be useless without action. They exist to be translated. We each have two immediate focuses: input and output. Input is the problem, the interest, the concern; output is the solution, the creation, the product. Thus a poet need not read only poetry to write poetry. He may also focus on his own feelings, may be troubled and traumatized by them, and thus cure them by casting them into words and forms. Creativity becomes therapy.
What of the reverse? What if we focus on the art of others? What we create, in this case, would be a rich heartscape, a sense of spirituality, an attitude towards the world. Art is our focus, heart our movement.
There are three processes: eating, resting, and exercising. Eating is your concern, is your joy and pain (often the same thing). Resting is digestion and gestation, venting and reflecting, playing and forgetting. Exercise is creating: what you make from it.
There is always a flow between focuses. The primary focus is the source of energy, which flows into the secondary focus: the creation. Sorrows sing; they crystallize the moment. This is captured again in the basic grammar of noun and verb, in the distinction between motivation and execution.
The fourth focus is the routine: what you take for granted and care nothing for. Conformity and nonconcern. Thus a “typical man” might think, talk, and do, but he doesn’t explore his feelings. Or if he does, they are cliché feelings, introjected from the world.
The mystic is one who enjoys desires as desires, who enjoys, above all things, the garden of his own feelings. A mystic might study numerology, or sacred texts, or music of any sort, or art in general, but he is the connesour of it, and does not create it. He exists only to experience it. He is the passion in the garden of gethseme, anxious to the point of heartattack, or a drama queen who loves romantic entanglement and the pain of love for the heartache and romantic exstasy. The mystic does not merely seek euphoria, but also the blackest despondancy. I do not mean she wills to be torn, but that unconsciously she loves the pain. A mystic is a masochist. All that feels intense is enjoyable. And if she complains and wails at the pain, that is to enhance and excite the pain. If she disliked suffering, she would not complain against it, but act against it, and thus put it to an end.
All dogmatism is a code for programming an inner experience. Myths belong to the verbal and the heroic, and are patterns to emulate; we listen to stories of heroes so we may fight our own dragons, to kiss our own dragons, to battle our parents in the forms of giants and snakes. The mystic does not care for the action of the myth, but for the static symbology. Symbolism, therefore, and dogma as systemized symbolism, are meant to crystallize and torture the heart.
The mystic, the ascetic, the sporter of a crown of thorns, does not inheret heaven—as if that were poetic justice!—but necessarily turns inward to a world of horrors and exstasies. The meek inheret meekness. Rejoice and be glad when others slander you, for you in turn will slander yourself, and seek always new places and ways to find ridicule. Read and realize that the promises and hopes we tell these masochists lead only towards more hopes, more promises—tortures and tantalizations. If these promises were ever fulfilled, how the saints would suffer their worst: boredom.
The heart is a garden, the mind is the sky, the words are threads, and action is land. Within the inner garden, we cultivate our emotions from the soil of memory, and cultivate these habits till they fruit. The world of threads are the tangled words of language and duty of society.
In Orwell’s 1984, Winston begins a diary against the State. “Down with Big Brother!” Big Brother is Christ, or authority, thought police are angels, or self reflection, O’brien is conscience, the ministry of love is hell. He fails to realize that 2+2=5 (symbol + symbol = symbol: convention is convention). He mistakes love for taboo, and only at the end, after torture in hell, after a baptism of alcohol, is able to realize his love for Big Brother.
Memory is experience of the concrete. Assumption is an abstracted memory. Memories and assumptions are by nature passive and indirect. We cannot force a memory, nor force an assumption, but must consciously symbolize it and let our brains take them in.
Between assumptions and habits is the Creative Space. Our habits themselves are not sensual (memories) nor conceptual (assumptions), but are charges put upon concepts or sensations to drawn them towards or away from our focus of awareness.
| MIND | |
| HABIT | DOING |
| | Symbolic acts |
| | SAYING |
| | Body laguage |
| | THINKING |
| | Metaphor mind |
| | FEELING |
| | Creative Gap |
| ASSUMPTION | |
Habits impulse ideas towards or away from focus. They aim to act. The four kinds of habits are feeling, thinking, saying, and doing. These four constitute a continuum. Between feeling and thinking is the metaphor mind, or the unconscious, the part of us that dreams at night, or fantasizes by day. Thinking is to turn fluid feeling into crystallized abstractions. Between thinking and saying is body language, that which we do not intend to say, which conveys our thinking. Saying is our means of fully crystallizing our own thoughts, so that we can communicate with others and with ourselves. If there were only one man in the universe, he would still need to talk.
Between saying and doing are symbolic acts, those acts which matter for what they mean as well as for what they do. Shaking a man’s hand, donating a small sum to a given charity, smoking a cigar at the birth of a child, and countless other acts say as much as they accomplish.
The mind is constantly surrounded by these impulses, and itself can select towards or away from them, or focus upon any of them and thus instate them. A man is always feeling, thinking, saying, and doing in all things, and life depends on our constantly doing each of these habits simultaneosly. However, certain men prefer one or two of them over the rest, and this determines the tone of his life.
The mind is able to focus on two things, and thus can both categorize and metaphorize them according to how and in what way the feel identicle. Metaphors convert feelings into definite thoughts. Metaphors are actions—once a metaphor is thought, the experience it was meant to convey is felt, and the metaphor itself becomes mere ornamnet. All ideas have a definite feel, or if they feel ambiguous, the ambiguity itself has a definite feel, as a cloud can be photographed, drawn, and described with utter precision.
The creative space, then, is the lowest feeling, those of dissconnect, anxiety and depression, both the same impulsive act. Depression, anxiety, suicide, fear, guilt, and pain are merely one experience of the creative womb.
The habits of internalizing, categorizing, and metaphorizing can shape assumptions into six categories: personas, poems, symbols, mixed metaphors, distinct metaphors, and definitions.
Personas are the most condensed and profound, definitions the most graspable and communicable. By these six levels of feel/thinking, we finally come to abstract and absolute definitional ideas, philosophy in the rigorous sense.
The habits as a whole are the unconscious insofar as they less directly influence thought, and are the preconscious insofar as they more directly influence thought.
Feelings crystallize to thoughts, thoughts crystallize to words, words crystallize to actions. Actions are the most concretely crystallized.
The “archetypes,” the “inborn metaphysics,” that we find behind all our stories, philosophy, and the various languages, are instinctual though habits that can, in fact, be overridden by education. Therefore what is universal is not absolute. And what is second nature can improve what was first nature.
The mind, with the hand of the habits and the glove of the assumptions, can reach in and shuffle the memories.
| MIND | | |
| HABIT | DOING | |
| | Symbolic acts | |
| | SAYING | Simile |
| | Body laguage | Metaphors |
| | THINKING | Mixed Metaphors |
| | Metaphor mind | Symbols |
| | FEELING | Personas |
| | Creative Gap | Situations |
| ASSUMPTION | | Stories |
| | | |
| | | |
| | | |
| | | |
| MEMORIES | stories | |
| | episode | |
| | experience | |
| | Fantasy | |
| NEEDS | Pain and pleasure | |
Memory is shaped vertically, tying episodes into stories, stories into motifs, and the motifs into a life-thread. A story is a program for action. We tell stories all the time between people; almost all talking is story telling. A symbol evokes a story. That is all a symbol is capable of, to present the feel, the tone, the undifferentiated fulness of a story. Story is the basis of culture, the understructure from which we build assumptions, concepts, philosophy, that great ivory tower which tickles heaven. An effective symbol when encoded correctly, is able to evoke the entire ambigram, the entire narrative.
Body language is in what the body expresses automatically, or with little deliberation. A gesture is an image of an action.
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.
Creativity requires both tearing apart and making anew. It is a synthesis of love and power. Power, from pater, husband, means providing for and defending your family, also impregnating your life. This fuzziness about eros, set up against violence, comes together in the power dominant manners of man. With sex, the man makes himself come, and also makes her come, to which she submits and desires. A disappointed man has nobody to blame but himself, but a woman is made to enjoy sex. So our culture says. The contiguity of the penis with a knife, club, or gun, as well as the negative correlations of fucking another and screwing her over, suggest a violenc against her. The man penetrates the woman, she may bleed, she moans in a combination of ecstasy and pain, for bliss and pain are intermingled with woman. A woman feels fulfilled to submit to a man, to honor his will.
Violence, aggression, pulling apart, can be as subtle as between ideas and feelings. Any time a man pulls away from one thing, he does violence to its perception. Choosing this instead of that, is a violence to that. Selection, in other words, is a violence, and combination is an eros. In this sense, it is difficult to ever fully clear an eros from a kaos, or a kaos from an eros.
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 àtechnology 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.
Power and desire are the basis of every relationship, no matter who with. Only in war and sex – perhaps! – are they epitomized and extremized! Normally, between friends and coworkers, sex and violence are euphemized, normalized, made respectable and decent, and become cool and daily. But press any saying, gesture, or idea deep enough, and you come to raw sex and violence, and indeed all the normal boring things of life seem so consciously, but deep in the mind and fantasy space, they are interpreted in their radical outlines, as a man sees another man and wrestles him in his head, or fucks a woman in his mind, though consciously he doesn’t even notice her – for the fantasy space entertains all notions, but only rarely does a fantasy persist and at last approach consiousness.
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.
We live within the logosphere and the erosphere. Eros which for us means the language of desire, literature, poetry, the tongue’s yearning herself, interacts with the logos, but her full sense is not in mere words, but in tone. The great man is known by tone alone, the coward by tone. Logos is the sort of truth that whatever the tone, means the same thing. Logos is the conscious desire for power, but logos the underconscious desire for love.
Our thoughts in conversation overarch us like a temple. The logosphere himself, the litrosphere, are conscious, are the names of the oversoul, the great flow of language and idea, those great gods Sophia and Wotan, wisdom and will, for all Gods reduce to these two, and any singular God would be incomplete. These Gods think and act through all their names and manifestations, and have a real consciousness through the flow of them through the world mind.
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?
Though love is a habit of feeling, the experience of this habit is less articulated, more a full of pain and pleasure; symbol is more articulated, without the immediate needed feel to them.
The logosphere is embodied in the internet, by which America unified the entire world under democratic principles. Indeed, England and America conquered the world so that insofar as anybody resists us, it is by adapting our own methods, our own styles of government, our own philosophies, which means they are us.
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 pours 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.
Love is adoration and nurture. She is basically the enjoyment of the lovely, the continual ingestion of him, the cycling over him with the occasional straight lines of intimate touch. In all of life there are but a few moments of contact. People who have had contact say stupid things like “God” and “Enlightenment” but it would be better if they did not blind us from reality with these ruses. Any man who speaks of God to me I presuppose to be a liar, and am rarely mistaken. My experience of the All I do not call God, I call her simply Mother. Perhaps that is more poetical lies, but what do I care if I cannot reveal her through a word. I merely wish not to be confused by the charlatons who call themselves “believers,” for direct experience does not come from belief, does not lead to belief, has nothing to do with believe, for a man who has does not hope, and a man who knows does not believe.
Love and fear are the desires themselves and in themselves have no power and can do nothing. All they can do is evoke and call forth other habits of thinking, talking, and doing. Everything that results in a doing is power, and therefore the hand stands for power, and the heart for love and fear. Mincing categories will bring us close to the edge of confusion, and the finest flowers grow upon a cliff’s edge. Technically, it is love versus fear, and destruction versus categorization. The mingling of destruction and category is creativity, and care is the focus of the mind both for and against an object. Love is not a power, but as a habitualized enjoyment seeking further enjoyment, it is used to evoke a set of habits that will seek a perceived vision. But vision is a matter of mind, and not heart. “Love for all,” never made much sense for human beings, since love requires intimacy and devotion, and both come at a great expense of time, energy, and effort. A respect of others as human beings is sufficient, and love reserved to those who hold dear. Love and hate are one, but neither is well-situated without the opposite pull of fear and hope. These system is subtle and takes some familiarizing. Power is beautiful, creativity is the highest power.
Love and fear are merely desires, which require powerful habits to be built over them. In themselves they are impotent. Power comes form the word Pater, meaning a husband who enseminates, and provies disciple and food for his family.
One
It has been said that logos has no opposite; there is no antilogos. Insofar as I frame literature as the opposite of logos (as system), it is not the annulment of logos.
Or to get to the point: that which has no opposite is the center. For an opposition is always two parts of one whole; and so a tension. The center, however, has no tensions, only intensions. What is our center? The same as it ever was: needs.
The singularity of my system lies in this: need is the center of the universe; need is the center of man. And focus is the centering of man. Need is the center, but it does not command a center: focus is the centering, the action that makes a world of the universe.
There is no antineed, just as there is no antifocus. In this sense, there is only Yes. There is being. Nonbeing is merely another form of being. Death is merely an activity of life. Unfocused eyes are merely a form of focusing. The oppositions are always two names for one part.
It is not thesis, antithesis, synthesis, but thesis=antithesis in a process. The flowing of energy into opposite registers is the means of communication. Just as a computer thinking in binary numbers is in no way opposed to itself, has no violence of thought, so too are binaries the moving of one into its opposite.
Thus we have need, focus, force, all interrelated and basically the same.
Under is ocean is soul is blood is salt-sea of electrolites in the nerve cells. Need is centermost is name is fire. Focus is awarenss is river is stream of consciousness. Body is mud is mountain is earth is reed. Spirit is breath is self-talk is all talk is wind. Will is cloud is lightening is hurricane.
This encoding is fun to play with on nature walks. To layer the mind into nature is an excellent way to commune with the body of the All, and to expore metaphors and associations uncommon.
The Buddhists called the soul a fire that spreads from wick to wick (body to body) in samsara. The goal is to snuff out the flame. The Hermetica calls the flame “the life of God” which is stilled to a stand still by the Power of God which surrounds it like a slow moving wind. Heraclitus said the soul was a flame, and it would be best it not get wet. These sorts of metaphors are common.
Need is untouchable by will. This the hermetica gets wrong. The power of mere spirit is supposed to touch necessity. We can readily feel and experience in our centermost this spiritual fact: Mother Universe or Father God her Will have no arm or bolt strong enough to reach our innermost: We are eternally sancrosanct in that deepest part. This the Easterners did not know.
We have of course poetry written in the air. The cresent moon grows pregnant when she writes from left to right, when her cow horns are pointed to the left, which inspires the right hemisphere of the mind: the wholistic right side: the big picture. English scripts right to left: it brings things to a finish, it is logical. The religion of the West is materialism.
In the same way, common superstition has it that Japan is in the East, and America is in the West (logically this makes on the sphere.)
~oLO7o~
The ololo, as I call him, or the old laughing master, is the man who has sank with the saint, flew with the philopher, sang with the poet, and fought with the hero – mastered every direction and comphrended them all.
ÿ
Perfection Is Easy
www.msu.edu/~junedan
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