Focus and Art
All life wishes to prolong and repeat itself, nor has an afterlife escaped the fantasies of any people, though some explain it away into this form or that form, but the needs remains. Art is sex, the same instinct, to improve mankind by making more of oneself into it. Therefore, the art work as child metaphor resonates well with the male fantasies depicted in the story of Pinocchio, a man’s handiwork come to life, Frankenstein, a man making life out of corpses, The golem, a man made of clay, and therefore of course Yahweh who lacking a womb enacts the male fantasy of making children out of the dirt (ultimately an anal sex fantasy), and this in parallel with Prometheus who makes man of clay, and the Egyptian story is similar, though with Wotan it is different, he both makes the universe out of a giants corpse, and man from the tree of an Ash, and here Ash stands for Mother Universe, the old fantasy of making the very woman we can’t control into the child we seek, and of course Pygmalion makes a statue that Venus brings to life. As in Pinocchio and Pygmalion, the magic of a woman is at least needed, reversing the traditional role of man as giving the magic semen that contributes the small part to the woman’s work. So it a male fantasy to create life without woman, the mind is a womb, and hands are the vulva that bring forth.
Therefore, whatever a man or woman makes, reflects best into the hidden heart of the man and woman. Our hearts are hidden from ourselves and the world, just as the secret of our age will take millennia to figure out. Art is the most transparent window to the very center of human life: as you create so you are.
It is not that all our body parts will resurrect – that would make death a mistake, and not a purpose – but that all we create comes back to us: we give birth in two directions, inwards and outward simultaneously.
Love and Fear, Sex and violence, Passion and power, the same pair said thrice, when combined make creativity, the kaos and eros that goes into the creative act.
The sexual artist wishes to make children for this world, and so he approves this world, and being thick of self, pridefully narcissistic, in love with his life, he wishes to repeat it and expand it: the world will be remade in his joy. Murder and suicide characterize the other artist, who makes the world ugly so a to justify himself and to take revenge on the universe, his parents, god (these all stand for the same thing) for making him alive. The pained make paints heaven, the overjoyed man founts gratitude. The artist is either escapist or he sings paeans.
Power makes beautiful makes lovely. Through creative art, power and love become one – the only divinity is the man who makes, who exists forever in time.
Nietzsche mistakes himself when he contrasts Classicism, as the calm and powerful, with Romanticism, the passionate and decadent. The categories don’t work. Classicism included a long period, best seen in the creation of the Greek Pantheon, where every God is powerful, and is both fully good and evil, the perfect balance of opposites – in this Nietzsche was correct, Classicism is the perfect, easy, gentle coordination of otherwise violently antagonistic opposites. Therefore classicism is the unifying of two. Romanticism is about extreme and exaggerated passion in one thing, a sort of monotheism turned art. Exaggeration – is that not the essence of ugliness? And would not a man twist all his energies into one direction precisely because he lacks energies independent enough to become powerful and in need of balance. Those who harp on one string lack the power to play a melody.
But here Nietzsche mistakes himself. The Classical genius was reborn into the Renaissance, a fullness as before, and immediately the infant fell and broke his leg, in the Reformation, but regained his strength on the other leg in the Enlightenment, and the enlightenment balanced itself with the next step of the Romantic period. Romanticism is the same movement as the Enlightenment, and would not exist without it. Therefore, Nietzsche is not justified in comparing Romanticism to Classicism.
And so we Allists do not see “this NOT that” without saying “also that and not this” and also saying “both” and “neither” – four is beauty. We take from the classical the calm, simple, abbreviated, the harmony of strong desires, but we see in Romanticism the overjoyed founts of gratitude, the intoxicated that wills one great excess to make a leap – we take both, all, everything, we say “no” by saying, “yes, and change it in this direction.”
Power beautifies, and yet it is not beauty. Power beautifies, power balances, power makes lovely, but it doesn’t love, nor does love love power, but respects it; love loves the work of power: eternity is in love with temporality.
A secret desire will usually have greater success than the open one. Even if the desire is not blameworthy, there is something in all men that wish to trip up, tone down, and dissuade a great passionate desire. Us passionate extremists must be subtle and modest, or so over the top arrogant that we are ironically taken as ironical.
The exhausted resort to pain to stimulate themselves, the need stronger drugs, violent movie, rape scenes, newspapers filled with child rape and foreign wars – to be stimulated at all. Being depressed they don’t have much action, and must pain themselves to react.
On the other hand, for the sensitive, in which a pin prick would kill us, we learn to control the inflow of energy by casting it back out again. Most children are traumatized – childhood is an extended trauma! – but trauma is too much to process, and requires an intense interpreter to either imitate it or to moralize it. If we lack the will to transfigure our pains, and give them the brow kiss of our blessing – a powerful man, a classicist, the renaissance man of all things could do it – then the energy can with little transfigurative will be repeated back out again. The raped child becomes a pedophile, the catholic child becomes a catholic adult, the democrat child remains a democrat. Or if he has enough anger to transform the energy into a negation, he can moralize against it, fight for the pains of others become a hero. This represents a greater will power, one able to instate moralizing habits. He says NO to many things, he condemns, he judges. Finally, a greater power is in the transfigurer who can both affirm the thing as it is, and also transfigure it in the future so that it is better. This is the Allist, who takes all things as existent, and therefore necessary for interpretation, recreation, and integration in the growing whole.
We seek the enlightened romantic. We know that all the streams of history pour into us.
The more sensitive a man, the more he must turn what he senses into a language, for words are the finger of consciousness. With words we can handle and bend all our experiences. All thoughts are bodily, all concepts in the muscles. Such a man will invent a sign language in all things. “Nature is the image of the mind,” Emerson said, “To study nature and to know thyself are the same thing.” If one is immersed in society, around other humans all the time, part of the church, part of the school, popular, he is so over stimulated by the world that he is bend and finds his place, and imitates and becomes popular. Irritable people start to imitate. Overwhelmed people start to go along with the motions. A great willed man looks with disdain at this instinct to imitate, and wishes neither to imitate nor deny, but to transfigure and by remaking things, make them his own.
Most people require mental therapy in their lives. The mind is the organ most complicated of all of them, and most susceptible to illness. But few of us become institutionalized. Because the most common therapies seem like normal behaviors. Mass hysteria, movie theaters, parties, drinking and drugs, and all manners of bad habits (any habit that one personally regrets but does anyway) are in fact all psych drugs that keep the person alive and functioning and as happy as he knows how to be, even if he complains (complaining is another therapy).
The secret desire has more success than the open one, and we would add that the deepest desires are invincible, are “drives” and will succeed always, so that we always get what we deserve. But life is longer then we think, we lack a view for the big picture, we think nature has tricked us, God has abandoned us, we curse our parent – and all of these are mistakes and for the wrong reasons.
Life is beautiful. The world is Mattria, our mother and ourselves. We call her cosmos, we call her All. The world is right, I myself am great and beautiful, and any man who feels himself to be a God is de facto God. Learn to say yes to all things, and to transfigure them into their opposites if need be.
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