This essay about Directness is presented as a mix of virtues together. Anybody who knows me knows that I speak directly and dislike personal secrets. And yet in another sense, we must keep our innermost sancrosanct. My writings both reveal and disguise me. Here I refer to my method of complete disclosure, the moment when I am able to reveal what my mining eyes have discovered. I do believe there is more truth and more love between each of us than we may say. Conversation is a thick game, every talk a wonderful game. Directness is one method, my preferred method.
Daniel Christopher June
=================================
Directness
Ever the bare facts, utter truth, perfect lips. Keep your tongue pure. Our sacrament is to clean the mouth, the hands, the genitals, the work station. Sooner die than utter a lie. Yes, and know when to withhold, when to keep your heart private; the beauty of your innermost is owed to no man, no woman, no spouse, no world or universe: this is sacrosanct. The rest is candid.
Yet we see two arrows in life: the directness of will, and the circle of guile. The passive aggressive, the sly, the guileful, hides the truth in what is not technically a lie. Guile counts on the ignorance of others, imposes it, reinforces it – but why let your honor depend on something beyond your control, upon the ignorance of another? And yet to outsmart all liars one must know how to lie; to hide your privacy, you must use the structure of deceit, and yet pull no teeth.
Prefer the method of full disclosure, of mutual exposure. Withhold your heart, hide your mind, until in frustration and lust for power, the other unbalances himself; then express with full force the extent of your truth. Make yourself fully vulnerable, and you will destroy him. Become harmless. You may master any man or woman if you have great power but withhold it. Lack the power, and your gentleness is worthless. Unless you can destroy another, your gentleness is nothing. Isn’t the earthworm gentle? True power is not in having the ability to destroy another, and withholding on principle, but withholding when this would perfect the situation. Each moment comes to its crisis, and you must turn its logic back on itself, speak the truth about truth, tell the lie about lies, hate hate, love love, reason about reason, or in other words, turn a thing back against itself, on the one hand, and at the same time take it to its farthest logical inference, on the other. Grab the situation, and turn one arm back against itself, and its other arm to its farthest reach, and you will broken its outer husk, and revealed its inner logic. Its idea– and all events, episodes, memories, and places, are living ideas – is held together by a material shell. To release the energy of an idea, you must crush it, making it more itself, making your hate more hateful, your love more loving, your fear more fearsome, going to the farthest extreme, leaping to heaven, sinking to hell, and at the same time, circling the eye back on itself, like Odin who turns one eye back into his head, into the well of his thoughts.
Drama queens know the logic of extremes. "Have you criticized me? You must hate me! Why do you even talk to me? You must think I am the worst person in the word! Would you recommend I kill myself?" Being able to take a gesture to its farthest reach – and that’s all a gesture is, the suggestion of a broader action – you can get at the euphemism, the agenda, the kernel idea, the mustard seed that grows into the mustard weed. By trying to say so much, I take it to the extreme, I make you back off and say the opposite. A cheap trick, when done cheaply, a subtle tool when done subtly. Most of language is abbreviated, subtle, we don’t even realize that the final extremes are present in our stray words, that the friendliest conversation is embedded fully with endless threats, promises, blackmails, violence, sex, but so euphemized, abbreviated, reduced to the slightest gesture, that they become sublimated, break off from their base, are fluid, are an ether, an apotheosis, and can become the free floating spirit of Lux – language as goddess.
To directly question your friend or enemy cuts through the subtlety, exposes hidden intent. If you are perfect, you will never fear accusing another. For what could he accuse in you? Realizing your perfection requires only judging yourself by your personal standard, not by foreign impositions. The standard which created you is the standard which will bless you.
The point of contact is brutal and rude. We might not notice it, I admit, but the moment of pure intimacy, in love, in sex, in literature, in life, is full on fire, soul to soul – and the rest mere scaffolding. So much pomp, so much formality, so much polity, in order to align your heart to mine, to let the bridge of contact leap for that mere second. It is as if hours and days and years were toiled to finally align nerve to nerve – and for that one perfect touch, the whole universe serves as stage. Face to face, full-on eye-light is but a moment. How often we have the perfect connection with any man or woman, but especially with the friend, just a moment, and the rest is nonchalant, play, shooting the bull, talking smack, nothing serious. For that one moment of connection, the rest is worth it. Intimacy is king.
We learn much intuitively, but we don’t know that we know it. We must work to be able to express the smallest gesture. Attempt to verbally tell another person how to tie a pair of shoes. He doesn’t get it. You want to show him. Knowing that is not in showing somebody; knowing how is in showing him. Therefore, there is a lesser knowing that, as the university student who knows that a business is run in a certain way, than the higher knowing how of actually running a business, and finally, the highest knowing that of being able to exactly express the former two as one. Of I can do a thing and teach others how, there is my mastery.
We seek the higher knowing. Knowing how is not enough. All praise it, nobody hates it, but its not enough. Wisdom speaks. Just as the ready comeback requires constantly considering biting remarks until they surface as if by inspiration, so does higher wisdom come from the oracle of thinking deliberately about all that you do. Most people quickly learn how to do a thing in life; the wise man also learns how, but much slower, because he is learning how so is and also learning what the thing essentially is. The average man closes his eyes and does it. The wise man keeps his eyes open. The wise man looks his wife in the eyes when he comes inside her: therefore the wise man impregnates her soul as well as her body.
Full disclosure requires a daily familiarity with deep truths. Know a thing, but know the end of it. Know how far deep the thing goes. For those who deal in lies, euphemisms, and omissions, a reference to our disclosure of full truth takes away their advantage. There is much implicit blackmail in our daily speech. Lacking shame, how can anybody twist your arm, or even look at your arm as if to imply that he could twist it?
Effective communication is the ability to cross layers, to speak to different layers at once, to leap from the general to the specific, to pass the needle from the side of thought to the side of feeling. “The known universe has one complete lover, and that is the greatest poet.” Call him Hermes or Wotan, the one who traverses worlds, sinks to hell and rises to heaven, upon winged boot in the desire for wisdom. My very body is the World Tree: the nine worlds of the Universe hang from me.
Anticipate your friends and enemies: know how to speak. Expose the negative early. Perhaps they keep that card up their sleeve, the hidden insult, the fact you don’t want to face. Address it first. Confess your weakness in advance. This is not humility, but pride. To fully flaunt your weaknesses, mistakes, and ugliness requires utter pride, the pride that doesn’t seek any external approval. Knowing your inner worth, you need no confirmation from friend or foe. Hide any thing from others, and you breath anxiety. The others may not know what you are hiding, but they know that you are hiding something, and you are therefore safely in their clutches. Or they too hide something, and as if by a hidden wink, your demon signals their demon, and you both agree to be blind to that thing, and to defend it against others. The widest conspiracies are committed by religions and nations, who collectively and unconsciously collude. How often when you finally confront a friend on a guilt, he suddenly lists your otherwise unrelated guilt, as if you had negated a mutually understood contract.
The full self is a circle: truth shines forth like perfect rays. The innermost creates a new reality into the world.
Vulnerability is invincible. So long as you defend yourself, you will be defeated. We confess in order to bind others, we hide in order to seduce them. Secrets are a currency: I give you my secrets to glue our friendship: betray them and you have lowered your worthiness of being anybody’s friend. Like Odin and Loki, we in our love exchange blood, become blood brothers, and thus our fates are sealed: what I am is what you are, and what happens to me happens to you.
The power you have over me, the power the world has over me, is the power I in fear grant it, and my defenses are the handles by which they hold me. When I become harmless, I can destroy you.
Know yourself, know your innermost, and you will be able to speak directly. Know your soul to the pith and you can speak to the heart of any matter. Learn the tones that open those inner doors. The innermost is divine, though saying so is not divine. A sense of the unique inner perfect you are, the greater-than-God greater-than-All centermost – once you touch this, once your mind is reunited with its source, that innermost necessity of your being, then conventions and situatedness melt away. These words you choose? Others would be as good. Place yourself any where in history, and you are forever the center of it.
Self-honesty is the greatest virtue, the ultimate, behind which no other virtue can go. Lack this, and you must worship the world, worship God, serve in somebody else’s kingdom, end up in somebody else’s heaven. Be utterly self-honest, and you are beyond the beyond.
~~
Perfection
Is
Easy
perfectidius.com
~~
No comments:
Post a Comment