"ideas as objects" an essay

I’ve been wrestling with this essay for weeks. Perhaps a few more and it will be decent. In the meantime, I must send him out to fare in the world and win some experience for himself. It explore the metaphor of ideas as tools.

 

 

Ideas as Objects

                Experience is the hammer which smiths our memories into the conceptual tools of our assumptions: daily we pound out the ideas that we will use throughout our life. Habits are how we use ideas, but every method requires at least an implicit idea of how the method should be applied. There is no practice without theory. Even the tools taken from our culture, second hand, recognized by an engine of habit that absorbs them from our group, each must be tweaked and personalized to fit our own needs and mind. The concept of God for instance, means so many things, contradictory things, to so many people, that the common denominator (which is different than an essence) to God is the sense of importance to the idea. All of our communal ideas, though we use the same words for them, mean something particular to each of us.

                Theory is the art of mirroring art; by theory art grows self-conscious, obeys the recursive principle of philosophy to “know thyself,” becomes wise, gains the recursive principle of ethics to “pride in yourself,” and becomes complex. We ought to think about our actions and the ideas behind them, and having discovered these ideas, we out to attack them, and let them be attacked, let all all our cherished thoughts feel the fire, and invite others to criticize them, for it is good for us to test our ideas and see which of them best serve us. Hold close only to your strong ideas.

                If your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like a nail. Thus the philosopher who lacks a wide assortment of mental ideas tends to reduce complex problems to stereotyped solutions. If philosophy is the art of defining, some Christians have only three terms: God, Sin, and Afterlife.

                Nevertheless, you must prefer one set of tools to all, those privileged ideas that come from your personal experience. What you have borne through your own life-struggles will serve you best, be it a story that has been told over so many times it stands for an idea, or a concept you came from thinking of your life-struggles.

                Religiously, you can wear clothing that reminds you of your central precepts, or tattoo yourself, or create a sign language dance, if only to universalize and ever repeat the ideas that you hold to your heart as the center of your religion. As religion is a sort of systemized importance – indeed, the creation of a world religion is the greatest achievement of man so – you ought to make your personal religion alive and ever participated in. Repeat certain gestures that stand for ideas and moods so often that they become triggers for moods. The nod of a head, the touch of a brow, can summon an attitude needed for any given moment.

                Below the myths are the commentary, below the commentary is the philosophy, and below the philosophy is the table of values. These values are a sort of magnetic equal sign that sets a group of ideas as equal, such as the equation of

God=Truth=Justice,

                or the Socratic

Truth=Beauty=Goodness=Justice,

                or the artists’

Art=Joy=Self-expression.

                The ultimate source of all values must be the self, and a healthy narcissism allows that self-reflection to fertilize.

Dance, and your shadow dances with you

Kiss the mirror, and he won’t be shy.

 

                The idea of ideas is the most integral to philosophy; the metaphor of ideas as artifacts is perhaps the best for showing both the constructed nature of idea, and their truth in their ability to equip us for life’s problems. Thus a purely theoretical problem doesn’t exist: all ideas must serve life. And just as a man can write better after talking to a friend of his ideas, and opens the channels of inspiration when he sets to compose an epistle to his loved ones, so do ideas become apparent as ideas when we try to convert them into language, and consider how they might appear and be used by another intelligence.

                What clever things we say to ourselves when we are inspired to do what we dread. “Leap on your challenges” is a good maxim. “Do your work immediately, do not put off till tomorrow what you can do today, never procrastinate, do the hardest things first,” are all maxims, a sort of ultra-abridged story that stand ultimately for a habit we are to adapt. This is the quickest way to transfer ideas horizontally across friends and vertically across history. Poetry, though difficult to our friends, is the only language that the angels carry to the ends of time.

                We must make our actions thick, so that our every gesture is a sort of symbolical dance, a lived poetry. Friends are an external memory, but so are our gestures, when they are deepened by secondary and tertiary meanings.

* *

* *

                All of life is a field for growth, for exploring the poles of love and power. We each create a world within a world, a playing zone, to experiment and grow with. For most people, a set of friends is this game world, and they explore all ideas through their friends. Some explore through a diary, some through sports, some through the novels they write, some through music, some through advancing a career. Each field is instinctively chosen as the place for that man.

                What makes one man’s ideas more profound is that he is working on many related projects at once, and seeking to work out his problems with continual ideas. I am forever pregnant with ten children, one ripe, the others arriving soon, and a few just beginning. A writers apparatus should be great “as big as the solar system”: for him his writing is a complete world, and the external world mere shadows and exaggerations of it.

                The finely tuned tools we make of our ideas are evoked by a careful language, our father-tongue. If our mother-tongue is the language native to our childhood, the father-tongue is the precise language grown from our adult study. Each word is a branch and twig on the tree of philosophy, leaved to catch the light.

                Every tone of voice resonates to a layer of the heart, so that listening to the widow wail, we cannot escape the sorrow, even if we harden our hearts and push the voice out, and try to hate her. Every tone speaks to our own feelings. So too does the depth of every idea resonate through those who hear it, so that a man is known to be wise or shallow merely by speaking any phrase, by noting the weather. The mere timbre of his inflection says it all. And the depth of a man’s wisdom is in the hold and glow of his eyes.

                Literature is the virtual world, which paints sensual ideas and people, but is ultimately peopled by the invisible ideas they represent. Every man is representative. A boss represents his company, and comes to stand for his own bosses, and for the company goals; his anger is more than mere anger, it is company will. It is as if he were placed in a node within a computer, and his mind and spontaneous feeling serve as an outlet for the whole system.

                A movie too stands for a such a node. In the theater, we not only express our feelings cathartically, but internalize the movie as a place within us to continually pour those emotions, to inspire new habits even, on how to think and feel.

                We must express our ideas constantly into our game world if we are to grow creatively, we must challenge ourselves always, taking vacations only long enough to intensify our work when we return. Milk yourself daily to keep up the flow. Create endlessly and let Darwin select. And learn to read the world, read the literature that is yours, whether it is studying a certain type of people, or an aspect of your own heart, or perhaps literal writers, a few who speak ever and only for you. Emerson and Whitman are the geniis I inhale, and my lungs are the lamps where they reside.

                The image of a multiverse is helpful here. It is not that there are multiple worlds that don’t touch each other, but the worlds are on top of each other, and bleed into each other. Metaphorically, we could say that heaven and hell overlap earth, they are not above it nor below it, and if a man’s self be eternal, what other place would he need to go, but into an aspect of this world. The intoxicated and the visionaries received visions of the mythic world as an overlap of this one, as if the god really pulled the sun as his chariot, and the symbolic meanings behind every action were literalized, if only in a simultaneous reality. All the imagined heavens, hells, purgatories, galaxies, and fictions were the actual afterlives of those who believed in them, and exist because they were believed in, and not before, and yet have final consequences for those who take them in. Perhaps such an attitude will finally give us a respect for the importance of ideas and beliefs, and a sense of the universal compatibility and interpenatrability of all religions and philosophies, like a thousand bodies that moving and acting, in their own universe, and sharing only one atom within their head, like a great living sphere. That one hole that threads us all together, who lacks this? It is the crack of imperfection in each of our brows, and the name of the thread who passes through all of us is Mattria, the consciousness of the motherverse. Spinoza, Hegel, Plotinus, and the East as a whole had a sense of this, and spoke of God, gods, Brahmans, and other things. It is a deep human intuition, and for this fact alone we must respect it, as we respect humanity itself, being human.

Harden your heart

Stopper your ears

Focus alone

On the task that is near.

                Buddha might have said these lines, and I myself must repeat them to myself, when the worry worm bites my heart, and the anxiety lines grasp my brow. I must remember that intellectually, the world is happy, and if I can move into this Platonic world of pure forms, which is interpenetrating this world, and is within things, I will be happy again. Moods must be expressions, emotions must e-move, but the peace of the mind is by subduing love with will, and letting intellect balance the mad and impassioned heart.

                The intellectual tools are the greatest objects mankind has created. They are preserved in our technology, they are preserved in our literature. Books are the best things mankind has created, and yet, a man who knows how to read can read anything and everything we have created, can read even nature, if he has the discipline to learn science. Reading and interpretation are essential acts of the human mind. The universe is a sort of book, and the mind is a sort of author. Struggle therefore to write the perfect ideas, the metaphors the explain the most, the trope fountains that let you create and solve life’s riddles again and again. These alone are the treasures you can take to heaven, and they are all the treasures you need.

                Perhaps a useful metaphysical story is to imagine your conception as an absolute moment, when time was born in two directions: backwards in history to allow you, and forwards in future to welcome you. The arrows will run full circle eventually, when you come back as a god to preside over your own birth, and every cycle you will be in the same life, but higher, unaware even of your previous place in it, a greater being, the eternal recurrence of the same, the grand spiral of being. For history is neither a circle nor a line, but both, a spiral.

                Not for nothing you were given this religion instead of that, and that you did this thing instead of that. Each instance is writ with eternal consequence.

                My own inner gardens are fertilized with the corpses of American Gods. I love my own. And yet I am the world’s and speak to the world. I take my immediate as symbol of the whole. Every man is representative, and stands for facts, categories, groups and clans. As a spouse, in her right place, stands for all women, and a husband, for all men, and children, for the future, and grand parents, for posterity, so each man is more than himself, he is many layers of being. He is a nerve cell of the mind of his country, he is a nerve cell of humanity as a whole, simultaneously. Consciousness is thick. Layer upon layer of thinking abide in ever second of my life.

 

* *
* *

                How can the heart be hidden! Where there is love, who can hide it? Where there is no love, who can fake it? Ideas are fine tools, but they are made out of mood. When I am happy, all men are my friend, but when I am depressed, even my friends wish they were elsewhere. A master debater may win arguing either side, when he is judged by technicalities, but he cannot win our hearts. The atheist cannot fake a sermon, the pastor cannot fake a critique. We pass for what we are. This deed, that deed, might be forgotten or hidden, but the character that results from those deeds stay with us and are exposed to daylight in every word and wink.

                Society passes forth great wisdom in its clichés and sayings, though most people do not get the full import of a time-tested adage. Men pass forward sayings like unopened letters. Presently, a few wise men open them up. The greatest books of the ages are toyed with by the disciplined professors, but again they are so many postal workers, bringing the worthy godling into our hands, to open up his mind for the select few who can add divinity to divinity.

                A man can worry his brow wrinkled on whether he has been cheated or lied to, and when he is so deceived, he wonders if he can avoid it again. Repair the breach this way: trust and be trustworthy. Trust sooner than you distrust, and sooner be duped than be suspicious. For the great things of our heart, the utter certainties and glories, come from within; in such a subject you would accept no man’s opinion, criticism, or advice. For the work you are here to do, perhaps the whole world will deride you, and you must shrug. We are hated more for our virtues than our vices. The fool has the strongest opinions, and the least useful. The wise man has the subtlest opinions, opinions spot on. The most annoying fool is the educated fool. Accept no advice from others, not on the central issues.

                It is good to be a little stupid. Every genius is a bit stupid. The simple people prefer to worship, the educated prefer to criticize, but the wise people worship and criticize in such a way that either is welcome, and both improve.

                The innermost shine is worth the world: God within, to hell without. Beauty is love’s form, beauty the language love speaks when witnessing the very she. Love is necessary to judge correctly, but it is not sufficient; a proper fear allows a balanced truth.

                Only art born of necessity will last. Only beauty born of a deep need is eternal. My mind is a thousand Hindu arms moving countless ideas but only a few fall into the blue two of consciousness, which cup over my world like the sky’s bowl. What pains and joys my soul the deepest, that is worthy of being.

                Compliment those who insult you, and praise those who gossip about you: be subtle and intelligent about it. Only then will you purify your heart and return to a solid focus on the real importance: your own work. Add metaphors and nicknames to all you see: milk yourself daily to keep up the flow. For all it takes is a conviction of your own infinite worth, to ever create more out of your own self. Where there is yet courage, there is always hope.

                Bearing suffering is easy enough, what else can you do? But to bear success, who can do it? All men are equally arrogant, only some wear more clever masks. Nothing exposes you like success.

                Every mood has a language and mannerisms, and what can be thought with a smile cannot be thought with a frown. You cannot fake love, unless your lover wants to be deceived, either to share a hypocrisy or to punish herself. Who has the full courage for his conscience? Only he whose virtues can exist in the real world. Love reality, and not ideals, and you will love a true love, something you can hold and touch. Ideals punish the world, whip and warp it. Truth does less good than supposed truths do bad. Love must balance truth. Love will forgive anything, hate can be impressed by nothing. It is shameful to realize that our friends enjoy our faults more than our successes, and yet a true friend will take pride in our glory as if it were also his own. The kindest word a reader said of my writing is “I am proud of it.”

                Read only to write, listen only to talk better: all the world must be fuel for your flame.

                Focus as you must on the day to day. The immediate focus is not the real focus. The real focus is a locus of gravity, below the surface, perhaps forgotten, but always draining energy into itself. The immediate focus, the work, the chore, is a surface matter. Perhaps for the moment you are more aware of it, but that will quickly change.

                Therefore, focus on the trope-fountains, those few ideas so finely tuned, as to be a smooth pipe, where the oceanic light of the needs flows without resistance. Let it feed your soul with the godspore with the allsperm, with the creative fountain of metaphorical unification. Metaphors are the greatest intellectual tools, they do the most, they are the strongest ideas. When I hear a metaphorical purity, in music, in the smile of a friend, in the perfect moment, when the very syntax of the situation is an allegory of higher meaning, then is my blood squeezed from my core into my skin.

                I play with my ideas like an empty slot puzzle, where the moving question mark is the empty space. I do not bother to answer all my questions I merely see where the chain will take me.

                The finger moving the puzzle pieces is the pent sexual energy, the love for Ama, the philosophical muse. She takes hold of me and I am up into the air like a spinning rocket, I break into the night sky and kick stars down like sparks from a  burning log.

                Great ideas are not enough, a great heart must inspire them. Life is so muddled. Conventions combat confusions. Life, work, love, and death are realities too wide for the mind. We must net them down with countless metaphors, rituals, and types. The ideas we build over these profound realities are the strongest.

 

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

 

adaptation of the first chapter of The Sermon On the Mount

Here is a paraphrased adaptation of the first chapter of the sermon on the mount from the gospel of Matthew. I tried to round it about and play with the style. There has been thousands of English translations of this book and no new one is needed at all, but I am doing it as a stylistic exercise and to gain intimacy with the text. You can tell me what you think.

 

Daniel Christopher June

 

 

Sermon on the Mount

 

            Jesus taught many people throughout Galilee, Decapolis, Jerusalem, and beyond. Seeing the multitude he would go into a mountain, sit down, gather his disciples at his feet, and open his mouth, saying,

Happy the poor, for they own the kingdom.

Happy the depressed, for they find comfort.

Happy the subtle, for they gain the world.

Happy the empty of righteousness, for they will be filled.

Happy the merciful, for their mercy will return to them.

Happy the pure in heart, for their heart sees God.

Happy the peacemakers, for they are God’s children.

Happy the persecuted for righteousness sake, for they own the kingdom.

Happy the reviled, persecuted, insulted, and gossiped for truth’s sake

            Rejoice and be glad, for great your treasure, just as the prophets were persecuted.

You are the salt of the earth: but if the salt grows saltless, what results? It’s useless: cast it out, stamp it down.

You are the light of the world: a city upon a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do men light a candle and smother it under a bowl, but put it upon a candlestick, and it gives life to the whole house. Let your light shine before men, to see your goodness, and glorify your divine source.

Think not that I come to destroy the laws and prophets – I come not to destroy, but fulfill. Till heaven and earth pass away, neither a jot nor hyphen will by any means be destroyed, till all is fulfilled. Whoever breaks the least of the commands, and teaches others to do so, will be least in the kingdom, but whosoever practices and teaches them will be great in the kingdom. For unless your righteousness outshines the pastors and preachers, you shall not even enter the kingdom.

You have heard the ancients said Thou Shalt Not Kill, and he who does, let him be condemned; but I say if you are even angry with your brother you will be condemned, and if you say to him “you are ignorant,” a flogging is fit, but if you say “you fool!” hell is better. Therefore, if you are about to give to charity or tithe to your church, and remember your brother has a grudge against you, drop your gift and leave: first be reconciled, and then you’ll be fit to give. Settle disputes speedily, rather then letting them escalating into legal disputes, and you will be judged and you will be condemned, till you pay your debt.

You have heard the ancients said Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery, but I say to you that whosever looks with lust upon a woman has committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye offends you, castrate it; better to lose only that then your whole body in hell. And if your right hand offends you, cut it off, better to lose only that then your whole body in hell.

You have heard the ancients said Whosever Would Divorce, Do It Legally, but I say to you that you commit adultery to leave your spouse, and whoever marries her also commits adultery.

Again you have heard the ancients said You Shall Perform What you Promised, but I say, swear not at all, neither by heaven nor earth, since you don’t own them, nor even by your life, since you can hardly control that. Simply make your yes, yes, and no no – anything else is presumptuous.

You have heard that the ancients said An Eye for an Eye and a Tooth for Tooth, but I say to you, Resist Not Evil, but if a man would strike your cheek, turn to him the other, and if a man would sue you, give him the money, and if a man makes you walk a mile, walk an extra mile. Give to whomsoever asks, and if another would borrow from you, do not withhold.

You have heard that it was said, Love your Brother and hate your Enemy, but I say to you Benefit your enemies, compliment those who insult you, wish well for those who hurt you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. For he warms the good and bad with the same sun, and cools the just and unjust with the same rain. For if you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Everybody does that. If you salute your brothers only, what more is this than anybody? Therefore, be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.

 

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

 

"on perpetual creation" a poem

 

Greetings friends, I wrote this one while I was at work again, but I must make a new resolution, now that I am a cashier and no longer a materials handler: no more attention to texts on my phone. It is better to be present at your job, especially if your mind is already soaked in verse. I am paying attention to the idea of mindfulness, to fully focus on one thing at a time. I count it as a useful tool, but not an ideal state, not something to seek for every moment, as it is advertised as. One more conceptual tool in the mental tool box. So now I am working mornings. Those who know me know I am allergic to the a.m. But to spend more time with my family, who are the world to me, I adjusted my schedule. I am attempting to make some personal changes: more aware of one reality at a time, and also less sensitive to criticism.

 

Take care Caretakers!

 

Daniel Christopher June

 

 

On perpetual creation

 

I blink lightning from my eyes

Impregnate earth -- a thousand tries.

 

If by chance the lottery’s won

She brings forth the red-capped son.

 

The fount of tropes of fungal bliss

Who by the lordly Ygg is kissed.

 

My many words are Darwin’s prey

Most my threads he snips away.

 

On your birth a gold cigar

With coffee cloved, with cinammin

 

Daily I address my soul

With anxious heart for hearty growth

 

The bathroom moods are daily cleaned

With microscope and soapy beams

 

My elephant shoulders are finely pecked

With moods critical against insects

 

My soma coffee manic mind

A sun of lightning burst and shine

 

The U.S. Gods are soaked in tongue

Which drips forth pearls when day is sung.

 

All these rites prepare the birth

Of a diamond tight metaphor.

 

 

 

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

 

brief thought about being a follower

If you would be a master, seek what the masters sought. Do not seek to match their footsteps pace for pace, for in doing so you will be not doing what they did, walking naturally and in your own style towards the goal, but you will be focused on his accidental footfalls. If you follow in the exact footsteps of a master,  what was natural for him will be strenuous for you. What your favorite person ate or thought are not relevent to you, though they may have been to him and his projects. The powers unique to you are new to the world, and can make you great, but nobody else. You must maximize them by your own native strengths, and not reduce yourself to following unnaturally the natural gestures of others. Each man has the potential to be the greatest of things, to grow indefinitely, but only from his innermost, and to betray that is to lose power, for that is light, and all imitation is mere reflection. It is not “what would Jesus do?” for such a consideration would be wrong for all excepting him. “What would be best for me to do,” is a much more interesting and powering question, which we must often ask ourselves in life. “What can I do best, and better than all others?” is a life-defining question.

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

 

"the assumed tree" a poem

This difficult poem focuses on one complex metaphor, the tree of knowledge within our assumptions about life. I struggled with this image for hours today, but I like where it took me.

Daniel Christopher June

 

 

 

The Assumed Tree

 

The Philosophy’s Oak

A Nerve-tree covered in eyes

Each lash an iris –

Rainbow trails upwards

The Bridge to heaven.

 

Her branches are sciences and arts

Every discipline sprouts from her

Each our minds is a bonsai miniature

Of her square structure.

 

We bathe our roots on mother’s menses

Stretch wide our brains under lux of language.

 

We shine our lightning eyes

Through a prism of psychedelic blood

Kaleidoscopic rainbows of metaphors and myths

Are projected upon the clouds

 

So crown your head and wet your tongue

Upon your daily bathe

Drop of rainbow sud upon your lips

“I the Clean and Glowing One.”

 

Let the bees brew poison

From the tears of the evil eye

Wild tropes, versus all rude moods

Whose sting is sexual angst of electric guitars

 

Each eye of wisdom pays this tax

Like glints of gold on ocean

Rhyming waves with sunlit crests

Your blinking couplets hitch to electric angels

Send your best like dust of gold to friends afar

As if you blinked golden coins from your eyes

What is given away in love alone can you keep.

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

 

"simplify" a poem

I’m working mornings now – can you believe it? I worked out this poem today: I’ve been thinking about how to simplify my life. Hence the poem.

Daniel Christopher June

 

Simplify

 

Simplicity’s necessity

   Is to knit a finer destiny

Quit the stitch by ten fold

   Cut a subtler history.             

 

Drop all but a few bare beads

   Know all you own by name

What shows your goals, a few thin needs

   Let that alone remain.

 

Edit to hell the excess of words

Urge to turn your work down by a third.

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

 

"the fawn" a poem

 

The Fawn

 

Your heart is a rose

And I am the fawn

Whose lips

So delicately

Destroy.

 

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

 

Life Purpose

 

Life Goal

 

For those of you who know me well, you already know the purpose of my life: to create and promote the philosophy and religion of Allism. My central vehicle for this project is my book the Idius, which represents over ten years of work so far. Every day I interpret my world, and weave life into truth; in this form I am able to intently study it and again clothe life in that truth.

 

I daily study Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Ives, and other great Americans, for I intend Allism to be an American religion. Though universal, it is to represent the American spirit and experience. Mormonism isn’t enough for American spirituality: I want something higher.

 

All my experiences in life feed into this one purpose; when I can advance it I am a shining sun, but when I cannot, a grey winter has engulfed me.

 

Take care, Caretakers!

 

Daniel Christopher June

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

 

"blocked" a poem

I am happiest of mortals when I can write, and saddest of them when I cannot. My philosophical mind has turned barren for now.

Daniel

 

Blocked

 

Clothed in virgin entourage

My trope-soaked robe keeps them aroused

 

Singing flitting wide eyed praise

I draw my love from limbs of grace

 

I await you now my midnight lover

All alone in darkness cover

 

Abandoning the fine young things

I pray to hear my muse’s wings.

 

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

 

"anxiety and the word," "Sophia" two poems

Two more poems I’ve written while working, in the form I’ve been favoring lately. Work seems so dull lately, and there is more and more of it; my mind is in no mood for philosophy, just cadence – strange beast that it is!

Daniel Christopher June

 

 

 

 

 

Anxiety and the Master Word

 

Unfocused locus of ego in pain

Pinched mind snaps at shadows that haven’t a name.

 

His sword scrapes metal, a symbol to sink

The daily anxiety in rivers of ink.

 

This press blesses life by swallowing all

The fortune misfortune that daily befalls.

 

Commanding and grabbing what daily is heard

The mind is empowered with each Master Word.

 

 

 

Sophia

 

I stretch my mind to press your lips

I spread the question of our bliss.

 

My phallic ego seeks to know,

Your subtle wisdom makes me grow.

 

With mind submerged within your tome,

I reach to seek the truth to come.

 

Eagerly reading your words with a kiss

The passion of knowledge will bring us to bliss.

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

~~

 

"The conceptual Mirror" an essay

Greetings my friends!

 

I haven’t written an essay in perhaps a month! Its been difficult for me to master the ideas I am struggling with. I have been writing verse daily, and yet the philosophical problems evade me, and I can hardly get them to obey me. This essay, which is about using concepts to reflect on the inner self, will be hard to understand: it is a start, an attempt. I am trying to get at a metaphysical metaphor that captures the essence of my own spiritual development. I feel I am on the right tract, and yet I must regard this difficult essay as a beginning, and not a finish, to a long journey.

 

Love,

 

Daniel Christopher June

 

The Conceptual Mirror

 

               

                The assumptions know no tears. Memories, the dirt of life, the fertilizer of the daily experience, sublimates into pure concepts, the heaven of forms, the perfect world of intelligence. The abstractions of ideas become beautiful, and the more we think of them, the better they relate to each other, till finally, at the end of life, as our passions and organs wilt, as our mind fades, we will slowly atone ourselves to the inner world of experience and prepare finally to die and enter the heaven that our own experience has made out of this world.

            Assumptions are structurations, pure forms, utter nirvana of bliss. And yet heaven ultimately serves God, the Wotan of our conscious mind, the ego of awareness. An attack on the ego is the greatest cause of mental illness; the very possibility of a breakdown is a breakdown of ego control, when habits breakdown and the mind can no longer think without great anxiety and depression. All mental disorders resolve to disorders of the passions which the mind can no longer control.

            The mental breakdowns of life are perfection’s crack across the brow. Who escapes the brow scars? – and ultimately, who would want to? We speak well of the unbroken strength of will, the cleanliness of mental isolation – intellectual independence is my own central virtue – groups compromise us, we must bury our heart before the friends, we must take on the virtue of hypocrisy to mouth enough moral blather to escape exposing our own evil beauty, and yet the very passions in our heart are already a society. They imitate the politics of our world. In America, our passions are a democracy, and Whitman is our prophet here. Who knows but in the fog of my heart a hundred Daniels express each his own mood. Whitman greeted fruit peddlers as equals, and lusted for all men and women, such was his approval of them, and yet his favorite word was “Great.” In a monarchy, one passion at least would sit upon the throne.

            The emotions take on the shape of our external political world, and the ego takes on a metaphorical shape as well. Our unconscious mind imitates the tools we work with. Just about now it is imitating the computer and the internet. At one point it was a complex clockwork. Emotions become tokens of the game of this inner God, the I. Whatever shape your I takes, know how to make a conceptual mirror for it. “The noble soul has reverence for himself” wrote Nietzsche, and again, Aristotle called Pride “the crown of the virtues.” For pride is virtue recursive. “Know yourself” is the recursive heart of philosophy, and is practiced through meditation for the mind and through prayer for the heart.

            The conceptual tools we build from our memories are the groundwork for our habits; a sound education is worthy twenty years of childhood, a college education, to give nothing more than a tone of voice. Life on this earth is for self-development, and serving loved ones and the world only as extensions of the self, again for further development. The soul must self-overcome periodically: tragedy is needed. Would that the world had more suffering in it! More heart ache! More anguish! Man would become greater and more perfect.

            The conceptual tools of metaphysics are to serve our needs, even if they are scientifically false. It would be best that they had no scientific status at all, neither provable nor disprovable: their full worth is in how they orient us in life. God is a prepositional phrase, Religion a grammar of the eye.

            Therefore, I saw that we choose our birth. That moment of conception works in two directions: backwards to allow us to have happened, and forward to prepare a place for us. The stage of life is never an accident and there can be no injustice in it. We kiss the threads of our DNA, the fate of our circumstances.

            For we need not innocence, but wisdom: that is the supremacy of Odin’s sacrifice on the world tree, and not as the other, to die in order to wash away men’s experiences (using his close friend Judas and his enemies the Pharisees to egg them on to murder him). My body is Yggsdrasil, the world tree, and my mind Ygg, the God who must die at the end of the world, to be swallowed up back into Need, when mind and needs converge again and I am one.

            Fire is sight, the gift of Prometheus is foresight. The innermost self, the needs, is a sun, the poem name of our conception, the very essence of our self. It is a fire which gives sight to the mind, a mind which in itself is empty.

            The energy of the needs shoots out like a comet, and the tip of the tail is never cut from the center until the energy fulfills itself in the appropriate object: then the needs becomes pleasure, and the energy becomes growth.

            Of course, the light of the inner sun sinks into mud at the dregs of the unconscious ocean. It slowly burps up as through molasses, mingling with the sensual world, and finding shape in the general shape of our memories – especially those stereotyped autobiographical memory forms called “myths.” The heaven of concepts puts the right math over the experience, till it falls into the engines of the habits and finally sees the daylight of the conscious mind.

            Life is about finding and creating the perfect self, and we do this by creating. Every man has his medium. Most of creativity happens through the process I have been describing, through the mythic and fantasy space of the memories, through the logical heaven of the assumptions, through the desire field of the mind. This last one, the habits, include our habits of feeling, thinking, saying, and doing, as evoked by Emerson’s poem:

 

I am owner of the sphere

Of seven stars and the solar year

Of Caesar’s hand and Plato’s brain

Of Lord Christ’s heart and Shakespeare’s Strain.

 

            We all have an affinity to a medium in our creativity. Most people are creative in their work, in their family, in their love life, in their style of speech, in their manners. The artist, who is happier than most humanity when he is creating, and sadder then most of humanity when he is not, wishes to learn to maximize his creativity.

            How do to this? Consciously, he must improve his own lexicon. Language is a thin film that coats all those abstractions we’ve made from personal experience. Learn to read and interpret always, to make fat the stomach that eats experience to better nourish the womb that creates. Learn to structurate all you look upon. As a writer, reading an essay or novel a dozen times lets you reduce the terms the author uses, to break everything into sections, to retitle the sections, to refer them all to one basic idea. Us writers haunt the libraries and read the very souls of the authors we worship. They are true brothers and sisters to our solitary hearts.

            And yet all listening is reading, and all talking is a story. Memories aren’t even memories until we have told them to friends a few times. Stories convert experience into style.  Memories become healthy the more they are integrated into our life-myth, until the tell again the same story of our personal ascension.

            Be telling stories again, we whittle away nonessentials, like the myths that, though created by great geniuses, we finally whittled through centuries of oratl traditions, until pure gold remained. Thus a philosopher, after enough commentary on myth, will have a neat little liste of concepts to control his world. William James was great at reducing complex topics to a short list of topics. Be the same. Look for essentials. Once you have made your purpose in this life, you will better be able to see everything in life as relevant or irrelevant to it.

            Make an alphabet of your experience. Work over them so well that they become a language of their own, a set of runes to render your destiny. Meditate often, therefore, kiss the dishes you wash for giving you time to think. The meditation of zero mind is fine, the mind is in its nature a nothing with shape, but it won’t save you. The creative power of the mind is the purpose of the mind, not its emptying out. The mind must render habits that will turn our tongues to the angelic language of pure poetry. Our actions and words must be ultraprofound – in this way we become eternal and worthy of it.

            Slave morality is serving the external – God, lovers, money, society, state. Master morality is serving yourself at all costs. Though your work be humble – as a philosopher or poet, mystic or hero it must be – your soul is noble. Higher work requires too many compromises. The slave is not he who does humble work, it is he who works for others instead of himself.

            Therefore, know your friends, those who keep you to your task and inspire you to love it. We are drawn ever together by secret magnets. This person is mine because she recognizes me and loves me. In my romantic madness I would kiss every stranger, but when I sober up, there are few I cling to.

 

* *

* *

 

Square of focus, Laser heart

Icons of your goal decorating your home

Bud your flower into brooding fruit

Plug the electric sword into the triangle sea.

 

            The ideas must be born many times, gestation goes on for years. The idea goes in and out, falls into the mind, is a lingering part of the problem memory, those memories which keep pestering us our life.

            Each creative growth is the reformation of memory and assumptions, a self-overcoming, a light shown back into the needs, and out into the world. Be creating alone can the centermost grow. We need the conceptual mirror to shine the sun back to herself.

            The structures of experience are held as assumptions. All structural forms speak to each other, kiss and breed; they stand for each other. The metaphor mind, that demonic habit between feelings and thinking, knows how to sound out each structure, and let one stand for another. Buildings, novels, persons, schedules, all hold structures, much richer and thick then we ever know. The master sees the essens of structure, and he is no longer an amatuer when he can reflect art back on itself.

            Our daily life requires ideas: the four habits of feeling, thinking, saying, and doing require a conceptual blueprint, the inspiration of heaven, to animate. Feelings correspond to memories, thoughts to assumption, words to mind, and actions to the body, and yet all of them have a skeleton of ideas from the assumptions. It is concepts alone that allow habits to empower the mind. The substance of the mind is idea. We must make the ideas that reflect life back on itself.

            The needs are the self-impregnating sun. The only way the centermost grows is through creating, and the idea of that creativity alone can shine the light back inwards. Pride is necessary, self-knowledge is necessary. The poetic justice of life is that we must live with who we chose to become – live with that forever, and no God can forgive your very self away.

            The innermost contradiction, the scar of perfection on our brow, the puncture in the inner innocence, cycles redundantly larger, until the peccadillo is a crisis. The internal contradiction can be resolved into a dynamo. Everything will be saved, all things will be great, only you must master and subordinate them to your self.

            Structures are in all experience. Structures are invisible, as assumptions are invisible, and yet we sense them. We must map them sensually to see them. The are categorical, metaphorical, emotional resonant. The metaphorical mind and poetic sense sees the love of all things for all things, the interpenetration of existence.

            The unconscious memories and assumptions must be fed a wide variety of structures, crunched up question marks that point to structural problem. Since great art conceals itself, since structure is invisible to the casual glance, indeed since it is only ugliness that reminds us of structure as structure, as in a computer program that crashes and dumps lines of code on the screen (or as in postmodern art), it require a desire to see the ugliness of truth before it can be remade first strange, and finally beautiful.

            All actions correspond to the base instincts, and yet they are microscopically nuanced, these gross urges, so that fine taste lets them be fulfills better, intellectualizations let them be known exactly, and the profound simple maxim as the apotheosis shines a new perfection from them. Simplicity is the beginning and the end. The sexual desire may appear gross in stupid people, but in refined, virtuous, intelligent people, sex is spiritual art.

            A theory of reflexivity must be assumed in order to make a habit of insight. A verbal mirror, a means of making a thing aware of itself alone will complicate and confound it and force it to grow monstrously complex, overly-wise, and exhaust its power until it self-overcomes into a new form. Only a literary criticism of novels can allow the apotheosis of novels to dawn. “Know thyself” “Prides is the crown of the virtues.” Odin finally makes way for the Baldr the God of light when the gods mistakes become self-reflexive. Getting a structure to speak its own structure reflexively, through clever quotations, is a means to make art recursive. Structures must learn to speak to each other in their angelic form as assumptions, in the angelic language of pure metaphor.

            The gross and silly actions of the child are repeated verbatim in the man continually throughout his life, in every one of his dispensations, and as the spiral of his eternal existence expands back over this life, next time as a God looking over this life, then as a universe overlooking that god, still that same primordial child acts again and again, but more subtle more masked, sophisticated and yet the same. The only bold turn comes when the centermost holds the conceptual mirror and impregnates itself with its own sunlight.

 

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

~~

 

"Luciana's Verse" a poem

This poem requires a familiarity with my mythology. Lux is the goddess of language, and Luciana is her daughter the goddess of love and poetry. Again it was written while working my job at the clothing store. An attempt, as they all are.

 

 

Luciana’s Verse

 

Lux entrusts these words to her daughter:

The tongue of desire and the madness of laughter.

 

After all, Lucy’s call is the threading of velvet;

Soul knit to soul, molten walls, breath ecstatic.

 

My poetry’s written of blood, and silk of love

My goddess rests from my neck, my heart her fiery dove

 

The centermost in is itself a poem

Our primordial creative first word is a groan.

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

~~