The Clutch of Doubt
Within his nest of jealousy,
Snailed as tight as love,
The serpent broods through leaves of matter
And nurses wintry thoughts.
The dawn breaks all her promises
The set intends no pledge;
If stalk of spring drips muse of dew,
The coiler coins his bet.
If chinks of doubt expose his hold
If breath of cruel unwords his most
The space of pain is freedom’s turn
Unfleshing slough of grey-burned ghost.
~ @M@ ~
perfectidius.com
Boy did I sleep in today! Maybe I needed it? And I had a strange dream which may be somewhat relevant. I will fill in details to make the ream more coherent.
In mankind's future we mastered control over our own atmosphere. More than that, we were able to establish earth-like atmospheres on Mars and Venus. We chose not to replace ourselves as angels. Other species, we had discovered, on other planets, had chosen either to evolve naturally or to replace themselves in part or in total by genetically modified pure-forms, an idealized version of themselves. Some had even gone further: they had evolved their robots and computers so far that their original species was no longer relevant, and dropped out to a mere atavism, despite a few experiments, decided to evolve without replacing itself and remain human-centered.
Well we had to fight off a few computer planets, inhabited only by machines and robots, and we had developed decisive strategies to always take the victory. But then one planet had an X factor, and we gaining the upper hand over our solar system. A few noble heroes developed virus codes to get into their world and seek out the x factor. That's where my dream begins. The heroine, a spunky woman, is seeking the X-factor. Well after a series of adventures and false starts, she arises at a place where the thinks the x factor is at. In fact, many of her comrades and other peoples from other races are fighting against the computer's immunity drones. The spunky woman, let's call her Cal, is trying her best tactics. But soon she is sensing that this is a set up arena, and that the strategies of the computer resemble her own planets. She sees that the she has herself become part of the x factor, where the planet is able to study human strategies in a closed system. She realizes if she tells the others there she will be killed and nobody will know, so she finds a way to leave and inform the human race.
In the dream I told my brother about the dream and he was not impressed. I suppose that was my own X factor.
Well what is the parable of the dream? To set up game arenas in our heads and not only to tolerate dangerous or foreign ideas, but to praise them and strengthen them, is the best way to overcome them.
Daniel
Life becomes first beautiful then eternal
perfectidius.com
this is the third part of that essay I began yesterday. It will require a lot more work to integrate and expand itself, but here's the first scent.
daniel
*
Even the most intimate of couples speak indirectly. An exchange of subtle accusations is the same as flattery: "You don't cuddle me anymore" means "I miss your touch," "Why were you talking to our [pretty] neighbor for so long?" expresses first protective jealousy, but beneath that, affirmation that the husband is worth being jealous over. The chatter of lovers is so personalized, a language invented by them in their mating dances -- the very dance is invented just for them -- that properly speaking, lovers have invented their own world and language. How tedious it all sounds to the patient friend listening in. Constant accusations, demands, calls for justice, insults -- and what it all means is the same thing: love me! Love me now! Tell me you love me! Prove you love me! A marriage is not merely an institution. It is a ritual, a daily ritual of affirmations of love, of scrutinizing each others faces and tones of love for love, faithfulness, servitude -- full ownership of each other: especially in free, easygoing, nonjealous spouses (don't be deceived).
Repetition is key: only repetition can see a structure, only constant repetition can guess an essence. A man or woman dates the same person over and over, because he didn't stay with one lover enough to figure out the problem. "Why do all my boyfriends yell at me" some poor woman asks. But rather than finding out, she goes through them, choosing the same type of guy each time. Rather than sticking with one guy and figuring him out -- or at least considering the matter as a single woman -- she brought the problem back in different forms.
It's the same with reading. We can read the same type of book endlessly and never figure it out: or we can stop at one book and reread it until we solve it. The beauty of marriage as a sort of enforced intimacy is that like the city that let's individuals emerge, so does commitment only let true love emerge, not in the heated moments of romance, but true love is a ten year flower: ten year of maintenance and the flower blooms. The individuality of our heart only comes after long, patient intimacy with one person. We only mature as people in the sunlight of private love. Don't tell me of unwed gods and demigods, of priests and other such riffraff. I only respect as my equal the family man: such experiences are irreplaceable by any study or substitution.
How weak it feels to ask for love, how miserable to be turned down. To ask your lover for kind words, as if kind words exacted in that manner could fulfill, what death in the heart that is. How love-starved the great men and women are, the lonely hearts who worship philosophy or truth alone. They are powerful because they have renounced love. Their muse is their mistress, their art is their children. Good and well: no man or woman could do better. But he could equal them by doing his art within a family. Sustained intimacy is not just a comfort, it is a trial. To stay true to a person when you feel an imbalance in love, to stay devoted, patient, and perfect to one who doesn't seem to care -- this is a discipline which requires great intelligence and self control.
Yet we are only caught insofar as we don't define our problem. Put it into language, put it into metaphors, and you can touch it, you can think it, you can overcome it.
My pride asks your precious modesty
To spread her veil of delight
To give tongue to his wish
To accept his liquid love
Into the essence of her being
Where there is accusation, anger, sadness, insult, insinuation, it cannot enter the depth of my love, the inner of my love, that special intimacy, that original form. Where there is irony, mockery, patronizing politeness, it is unwelcome, you are unwelcome, and the doors will shut. That verbal violence when you bring reproaches against me, or me against you, where I have to define myself, have to explain, when you insult or accuse me, or I insult or accuse you, that is not the place of innocence and intimacy.
How thoroughly we are bound by words and gestures. They make real chains, real mechanisms. An entire edifice of justified blame holds us in place if we deviate in our duty. The words resound around us: a country is humming with justice; the very air is utter dharma. There must be a way to escape it all, to be alone with your self and in touch with your tender innocence. You must learn to walk through a mirror.
The world of ideas, that mindscape which is a layer over all reality, this contains the greatest treasure yet existing. Ideas are the greatest technology to exist. Let all the artifacts and technology of the world evaporate. Within a few generations, our ideas would quickly bring us back up to where we were. Though the ideas live, think, and communicate through our artifacts and tools, they also exist in our brains and minds.
Each nation has no greater treasure than its national literature. No monuments, no gold and jewels, can compare with those perfect works that express the soul and spirit of a nation. To add to a national literature, either as a hero who is reported, or as the poet who does the reporting, is to offer the most patriotic worldgift possible. I think there are no better men than the writers who in their books also script our lives, hopes, and dreams.
Ideas, mere ideas, mean so much. Taking the final test of the semester, getting married, confessing a crime require little physical work, at least in terms of muscle movement. And yet they can be utterly exhausting. A father may be bushed for a week after his daughter is married. It is not a mere matter of our emotions overwhelming the body. Those emotions are centered on ideas: ideas themselves exhaust the body, move the entire organisms. Mere ideas make life, make all the different. If you were having a bad day and your girlfriend gave you a call and reported that you had won the lottery, you would be filled with enthusiasm, you would sing, dance, and be cheerful for the rest of the day. If, when you got home from work, your girlfriend admitted she made up the story about winning the lottery just to cheer you up, after you refrained from choking her you might reflect that the mere idea of winning the lottery had caused the most extreme physiological reaction on your body. We think with our body. Our ideas are in our blood and muscles as much as in our nerves and brain. Ideas, the thinnest and subtlest part of matter to exist, are more important than any other part of matter. Soldiers ultimately fight to the death over ideas, young men and women heroically dedicate themselves to fighting their whole lives for ideas, for the idea of love, for the idea of justice. Ideas, mere ideas, are the most important things to exist. The only thing more important than an idea is the self which loves them. Perhaps the self itself, the Name at our centermost, is a sort of idea, a self-increasing bonus for the world, which spreads more meaning and beauty constantly into the world. The personality is a substance which filters through all the ideas of the world and selects but what best represents itself. That personality is the image of the self, mixed with choice, education, and genetics. The idea of me, the idea of you, is your eternal being.
The centermost of each man is an unspeakable name, but that name speaks. It speaks the Tao, the way of our life, and it is the conscious I which is the flame of logos, the logic of light. God, like every being, centers an an unspeakable name. We are each our own Word. That word Emanates making the poem of our soul. That poem writes the rest of our being, bleeding the light of our being into the world or our senses and into the universe at large.
The create a new idea, the idea of who you are, to be, finally and eternally, yourself, requires a full effort, and not merely a self-reflective effort, but even a forgetting of the self, a full focus on the external project, on humanity, on a group, on technology, on some life passion. "Know thyself" cannot be a final ethic, or at least not in its meditative form. To know what you are capable of by in fact doing it, this is what it means to know yourself. We can't know our limits until we've met them, and even then we can step a little beyond or limits and ontologically change our being.
Not only our life, but our ideas may survive our death. We may create ideas that live forever. Art, technology, science, crafts, buildings, and the ideas of them all, live on in the very air, and in the talk of people, in their minds and histories. The metaphysical world of ideas is never finished. It is always infant, always growing, always willing to receive the sincere mind and passionate art who worships here by adding to her glory.
Life becomes first beautiful then eternal
perfectidius.com
A quick continuation of that last essay -- my tongue is wet tonight
Social Spheres
The experience of the "social sphere" or the world and its people, which is an aspect of the logosphere, or the world of language, and evokes the world of ideas and feelings, needs no deliberate attention to explore. We feel it. We feel trapped in a relationship. A man is living with a woman who demands all his time and energy. Somehow he feels she is draining him, and yet he cannot leave. Clearly there is no lock on the door and she does not have a gun to his head. Our social relationships are as real as such physical things, and yet invisible. This complex web of language binds us: we are bound by words. It is hermetic to set such verbal boundaries, and freely transgress them, but who else but Hermes could traverse worlds with impunity? If you commit a crime, betray a loved one, or insult an enemy, you are world-building. You are making intelligible objects, as real as that cup on the table. If anybody doubts the importance of such ideas and the relationships they create, read a few suicide letters. It is not concrete objects that kill a man, despite the noose or gun, but the world of relationships, emotions, and the ideas those things grow from. Interpersonal relationships unfold from language. And yet insincere speech cannot do the trick: words are magic if anything is magic, but they must be spoken from faithfulness and conviction.
To read life with metaphorical eyes is like reading a novel with a certain interpretive apparatus. A feminist reading may say "the only thing that counts, the only thing of interest, is in how women are represented, and what attitudes and values pertain to women." A novel is more than that of course, much more, but for the agenda of the reader, who is looking to understand a well-defined world, the feminist world, such a reading gives her resources from which to build from. And we all interpret the world according to some table of values, to some philosophical apparatus of logical equations and arguments, which support an interpretive mode over books in are hands or the book of life.
Most of language is euphemism. The images in our minds are toned down ten degrees and set in a form they will best be received. We mean the other person to catch our drift without saying the words. To say to a man you've been dating, "After these few dates I realize I don't like you or want to know you anymore," which is after all a natural reaction and does not necessarily impute anything wrong with the man, merely identify his incompatibility with this particular woman, could only be heard as a direct violence to his heart. When we speak we always assume the standard of convention, of politeness, and civility. If one eccentric man meant to say the direct, honest, literal truth in every situation, he would quickly and constantly be reminded of the convention of politeness, and simply could not formulate his words without reference to it. Convention itself is a violence: agree with it and the people smile, oppose it and they frown. Oppose it too much and their violence may become physical. If a man walked up to a cop, and using his free speech to say exactly what he thinks about cops in general, though he broke no law -- unless disrespecting a cop is a law -- he could be arrested. For those without a work code to back them, such as telling the motorcyclist what you think of his gang, your safety might be in worse shape, and even among the gentle people at church it doesn't take much eccentricity during a church service to be escorted out. We are so thoroughly immersed in conventions, expectations, morale, and proprieties, that it is only their ubiquity and thoroughness that leads us to say "we are that free country and no other one is free like us."
We idealize freedom, that's the difference. A good difference too, but really, other countries are not unfree merely because they have conventions which would be painful to you. They feel themselves to be free too. They've been educated, so that what they feel comes naturally is also what is conventional. I don't think refugees in our country feel especially free when they are gawked at in grocery stores and pestered to explain their story, as if they presence required some justification. The political freedoms we practice are boon unto the world. But the social freedoms of personal independence, though praised here louder and better than anywhere else, from such gold throated gods as Emerson and Thoreau, become mere truisms for saying and not doing in public practice. Only in large cities are the truly eccentric tolerated. Thus the greatest creative geniuses live in great cities.
Only in large cities can individuals emerge? Why is this? Are there not individuals everywhere always? Yet consider the individual at home. Dad is dad. He acts like a dad. If you do something illegal, he plays the policemen, if you play with matches he gives the a fireman's lecture, if you need help with your homework, he is teacher. Because the world of the family must abbreviate the whole world, each member stands for many things: to the preteen, the parents represent all of society, must explain to the child how whole classes of people will react to them.
Societies need all of us to fit a role. I think there are men who will not become the town drunk because the role is filled. We all seek our perch of privilege and our throne of importance: we want to offer something new to the world. As we are all voyeuristic, and participate in each person by hearing his story -- with the millionaire we are all rich, with the beggar we are all power, with the suicide, we all coax our suicidal urges, with the mystic, we all touch God -- and so we all want to find our niche. In a small town, the most important roles must be filled first: the gossip, the moralist, the political conservative, the black sheep, the scapegoat. Like the family, we have to do double duty.
Only in a wide sprawling city are there so many roles available, amidst all the crowds there is finally space to be yourself, there is a sense of anonymity, no body to force you to be his goddess, no one to force you to be her savoir, there is space between people, one can blossom his inner being. There is space for differentiation. Out of 100 people there will seldom be anything but the necessary roles. Amidst large populations there will statisticians, architects, spoon artists, chess masters, bird-trainers, magicians -- and what's more, these odd balls are living close enough together to discover each other, to be together, to be misfits in a club. And interestingly enough, get enough psychoanalysts together, enough nuclear physicists, enough conceptual artists, that these people can first of all let their defenses down -- its okay to be a philosopher, no you don't think you are better than everybody, no you don't hate religious people, no your not an anarchist -- your people get you. For the first time, instead of being a philosopher among nonphilosophers, you can be a philosopher among philosophers, without defenses are endless and annoying explanations, you can finally be a philosopher, and what's more, you can be your own philosopher: you again differentiate at. No longer do you have to stand out for the world for just philosophy, but now you are an existentialist philosopher. To others it would require enough energy explaining philosophy. Now let's say you have a set of existentialist philosophers you hang with. Now for further differentiation: you like the early Camus with a touch of Kierkegaard at his best moments, minus the apologetic elitism of his Christianity, with ambivalent feelings towards Sartre and his seeming misanthropy, etc. etc. To your parents you were just "the bookworm" and that's it. But among these people you are able to cultivate a private, personal, and individual aspect of your mind.
The internet is the World City. Everybody is your neighbor on the internet, you can talk with them instantly, you can discover those rare folk who share exactly your bent of interests. How else could you find so many parrot lovers, other than on a parrot club online? In your hometown not one other person owns a parrot. In this, the internet, which tends to greater and greater anonymity also tends to greater and greater individuality: the double gesture so characteristic of democracy. As Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, the minds of democracy, both approved the masses and emphasized the infinitude of the private individual. Egalitarian lends itself to elitism: the balance is always present. Where rank and aristocracy is sealed off in artificial forms of social habits, there is role playing: where aristocracy is based on individual self definition, the game is different, better.
Life becomes first beautiful then eternal
perfectidius.com
I just whipped up this essay in response to some provocative questions some friends have posed to me. It concerns worlds of experience we each can open ourselves up to within this life, as if we could hallucinate whole new dimensions, but hopefully saner than that. The world of ideas and feelings are explored in a literalizing and metaphorizing dreamscape.
Take care, Caretakers!
daniel Christopher June
The metaphysics of the Idea World
The crime of both philosophy and science is to separate an idea from its context and to define it in isolation. Since the scientific method by nature can only comment on what is falsifiable, and since philosophy can comment only on what is refutable, scientists and philosophers might abbreviate their world to claim that only the falsifiable, only the refutable is real, worthy of study and reflection, and the rest, if necessary, is secondary. Thus the stereotypes of the cold-hearted scientist and the cloud-walking philosopher. To be a whole man, to be rounded off and integrated, a scientist must be more than a scientist, and a philosopher more than a philosopher, indeed each man must be a fullness, not merely identifying himself to what he feels partial to. The place of Allism, therefore, is not in any branch of knowledge, nor outside any branch of knowledge, but exists in the integration of all that can be experienced, and all that can be abstracted from such experience. There is no other to the all, nor does Allism except any reality or experience from its concern.
As the Map lays out, the gravity of a man's experiences lies in the needs that evoke and organize them. An experience is not value neutral, could not be, for an experience exists for a purpose, the end of the man is the in the fulfillment of his needs for stability and growth in relation to the world and its people. Those experiences of reality, those reactions of needs to the inner and outer world, fall into memories, and the sum of them we may call "knowledge." That a man experienced such and such, that a man now experiences such and such, is self-evident, there is no truth nor false in what an experience is, only in what it means. Thus the proper realm of truth and falsity is not in experience, but in the concepts derived from experience, the abstractions we call our assumptions. These assumptions, catalogs and categories of theories on how to practice the art of life, are in themselves without emotional tone and valence -- an experience of them is akin to the philosophers heaven: a sober peaceful enlightenment. Yet they have no final use in such a form: the ideas must be ordered according to value, valances of desire and programs of impulse, put into a system of belief, requiring mental representations for conscious perusal, ascriptions to a conventional language that can be shared between minds, such as English and German, and programmed into a lifestyle and code of behavior. In short, concepts must be made into ideas, and those ideas into habit.
We can break apart this incarnation of an idea into habit along four modalities: habits of feeling, habits of thinking, habits of saying, and habits of doing. The idea itself, and the concept it is based upon, is some highly defined atom, perhaps abbreviated for the sake of transmission amidst one mind and itself, and one mind and others, in a symbol, an image, a sensual name. This name, which is evoked within that same experience of the idea -- and every concept's meaning is the sense or experience we have when we think it -- works as a metonymy to evoke the full experience, if so desired, by the evocation of the name, or, just as equally, to pass on the name and the idea without fully experiencing them, as we may communicate thousands of ideas without really thinking much on any of them.
Being in the world of the senses means living in a mental landscape formed of a moodscape, a mindscape, a logosphere, and a plot -- the "worlds" of feeling, thinking, saying, and doing. Properly viewed, none of them can be fully abstracted from the other. All ideas have meanings. Lacking meanings, they would not be ideas at all, but strictly information. The ideas meaning, as a habit, sets in program a range of other ideas in the form of feelings, moods, thought processes, patterns of speech, and modes of action. At the center of this flurry of representations if the consciousness itself, like a ball of glass that may focus on a few ideas at a time, who of their own valence may move into the sphere of awareness, and affect the other ideas there abiding. The habitual nature of feeling, thinking, saying, and doing, gives the behaviors a sense of a compulsion which we regard as natural. Our thinking, by a lifetime of practice, has become so streamlined and automatic that we no longer see any other way of thinking as possible, and when interpreting the words of a man who thinks widely different than ourselves, we may suspect he is committing one of the three deadly sins of the mind: stupidity, self-deceit, or insanity.
Given that all of us can approach ideas only in a pragmatic sense of knowing how to use them but not knowing how to define them -- even the most cerebral of us cannot fully define an idea -- just as children can speak grammatically without knowing what an "adverb" is, the deep thinker who is able to break the maya spell of habit and look at the programming of mental experience itself may glean some powers thereby over himself and others. This mental world, this mindscape, is an infinite frontier, a limitless adventure: when a man comes into his own, he is able to think in a way nobody has or can: his mind is a never before seen gift to the world.
But that doesn't concern most people. If there are two objects that most concern peoples minds, ideas and people, most of us prefer to focus on people. They are much more interesting then delineating what exactly and in excruciating detail what is and what is not "justice." But they are mistaken if they think people are easier to understand then justice. Such abstract ideas can at least be defined and argued for. But just as one can tell why he likes a book on philosophy or not, he would be hard pressed to tell exactly why he likes a given novel, let alone be able to explain what is the formula for a good novel. It is easier to relate to people, but harder to theorize about them.
I think, therefore, that the most successful psychologist to date have not been those who articulated skeletal frameworks for human behavior, of which psychology enumerate in a digested simplified formula, but those passionate and strange beasts we call novelists, who have a special sensitivity to the world and her people, and can evoke and define a given experience in such a way as to show some psychological truth behind a plot or a character. Indeed, we all can do this on some level, as our mature moral guidance comes less and less from sermons, and more and more from novels, and, for better or worse, the cinema.
But a man may reflect on his life and experience wherever he is at, and without recourse to any other thinker. Every original thinker started with himself. Around us is the world of the senses, a world ordered by our percepts to be made up of self-identical objects in spatial and temporal relationship. But that is not the full world. The world and its people implies a far richer experience. The child walking down the street creates an experience enough to startle any thinker, and if an exact transcription of it could be put into some other language then immediate being, what greater text could we study?
Amidst our sensual situation are the worlds generated from the four modalities of habits. We talk endlessly in the logosphere, but we mean more than we can say. We mean it, and somehow the thin words we say conveys it. Look at the mere words and you would wonder how a man is understood at all. But both men in conversation sense by intuition each man's mindscape and heartscape. If a man were to walk amidst a crowd of people, he doesn't know it, but he feels nervous. Nothing need be said, but he is not among his own. There is a feeling of foreboding. To explain things in a metaphorical representation of the mindscape, in the universe of pure forms, which exists within and overtop the sensual world, it were as if the group were holding hands in love, and one of them were pushing him out. Indeed, our gestures imply in themselves the gross forms we rarely have to resort to. Rarely is a man lifted from an assembly, thrown out into the street, and locked. But the spiritual effect of it is communicated in the smallest gestures. A man may walk amidst a group of friends who have discovered a crime he had up till then hid from them. They need not say a word, nor he, but he senses their coldness, intuits what they've learned, and as if they had violently evicted him, the mere gesture of rejection in a cold eyes and a dismissing look has the same psychological effect.
This mindscape, and word of ideas really exists, it is no fantasy. But how does it exist. Somehow, the sensual world and the actions we do in it is overlaid with language, which is underlaid with ideas and feelings. They are all present in the hard and literal matter of the world, and yet both transcend it and are immersed in it. The dissection of careful study, of dissection, may expose some informative angle on the matter, but no frog is fully known in the dissection lab. The full experience of a frog or anything comes from the accumulation of a wide range of experiences, from different angles, processed though different heads, expressed in the menstruum of language, insinuated through the moodscape and its flow through small gestures and otherwise invisible body language and subtle tones of voice. It is all ultimately one, but in its one form it cannot be known. Only when it is seen in its many form can the one form then be known, just as philosophy and science are inspired by poetry, and themselves come to fruition when they return to poetry, or some living form of language and metaphor. A truth isn't fully a truth until it has beautified itself.
That this cultural world is world of a million conventions, many of which we don't' even have words for, little understandings we have of what is appropriate to say or do, or not to do, would be invisible to us all if it weren't for the mentally abberated, the insane, the retarded, the autistic, or the artistic. It would all be unconscious habit, which from a conservative standpoint, lets the world run smoothly and predictably, but from a liberal standpoint freezes progress and innovation. We need both conservatives and progressives, the way the left foot stays behind on the ground when the right foot steps forward.
To slip into the heartscape or the mindscape, indeed to become conscious of the logosphere or the plot of life means not simply hallucinating that you can "see" relationships, but it means adapting a pair of glasses that see metaphors. We can say "My dad is kinda like a Chinese emperor." Suddenly, by saying something that is clearly false, a trope, we can break the literal world of inevitability. All tropes, which are nothing but sophisms and tricks of language, break us the way a Zen koan breaks us from seeing things as we always do to seeing them wrongly. It was a wise man who said, "if you dare to be wrong you may one day be right."
Adapting a metaphorical outlook on the world, which William James identified as the mental capacity behind both poetry and hard science, we properly enter new dimensions of being, new worlds, invisible worlds. To live in a world of pure feeling, desire, emotion, and mood, or to slip in a dimension of pure thought, to see concepts, ideas, abstractions as literal geometrical shapes, as cogs and wheels, as whatever metaphor best exposes their essence, is not only to escape from the painful necessities of daily life -- work, heartache, death -- but to gain new tools and powers to bring back to your daily chores, duties, and responsibilities. The scientific quests and philosophical adventures we dare when we are alone or in the laboratory may be made to comment on our daily life. What is wisdom, after all, but the ability to make analogy between any new experience and some prior experience? Wisdom is to see the basic structure in a problem, challenge, or question, and refer it back to questions that have already been answered. Was not the hidden analogy in the parable Nathan gave to King David about the slaughtered lamb the best way to broach the king's moral blindness to his own crime? Aren't we all blind constantly on many matters, without knowing it?
The conman, after all, the deceivers, the religious manipulators, the politicians, the swindlers of every level and degree, are willing and able to see a truth one of us has blinded himself to. By seeing what we hide form ourselves, and gaining access to it, he becomes invisible himself when he slips on the mask of the taboo topic. Self-deception, as I've often said, is the root of all error, the greatest bungling a man or woman can do, but perhaps necessary, for a time, when our constitution and cognitive powers cannot face a reality. How often we are blinded from one truth by staring fixedly at another. Aren't the greatest liars not those who lie, but who speak the wrong truth?
These layers of experience we are embedded in, the thick world of heavens and hells, plots and dramas that are in the very air around us, render life infinitely interesting, a book never to be exhausted, each of us a self-reading book, an author of life, and presents to us a universe open and inviting for our growth and creative enlightenment through the game of life.
Life becomes first beautiful then eternal
perfectidius.com
Essay on Poetry (final section)
Sanity is having plausible excuses for your madness. What is the basis of religion, mystical experience, but a species of madness, which only justifies itself when a rigorous and often dogmatic interpretive device is placed over it? All of life is a sort of madness at heart -- not some neurosis in the dead science of psychoanalysis, but true madness, Romantic madness, the wisdom of the heart.
Poetry is makingness. What is made? Not ideas, as in philosophy, which is the art of defining. Philosophy speaks of the assumptions that order experience: philosophy is a grammar of categories, a logic of definition. Poetry gives definite experiences, but not their explanations. Poetry is the art of suggestiveness. Clearly mere words cannot give you the experience the poet has if they were a transcription of his experience. "I felt sad, I cried," is newspaper stuff. Poetry does not refer to things, it gives the experience itself. What sort of experience? A poetic experience, something not even the poet could experience outside of his making it into a poem. A poem, ultimately, and as all art does and must do, refers primarily to itself. It is no mirror of life, it is itself, a positive addition to the world: a poem gives you an experience you could not have without the poem, and the same for paintings, music, drama, and all the genres. The ideas of poetry may be better expressed in philosophy (or history, or science). Those are merely the concrete holders of experience. The evocative, allusive, suggestive experience rendered by poems is by no means also indefinite. It is definitely suggestive, and not just suggestive of anything that comes to the mind of a careful reading: the full idea of the poem -- yes the poem is an idea, an experience, a precise, self-similar identify -- is in a careful, attentive, and exacting reading and rereading of the poem's body. A poem doesn't mean just anything, and it doesn't mean just one thing: the poem is a pluralverse, a set of worlds overlapping, with exact laws and strict limits, limits which exist even as the meaning of the poem pours into the all -- and every good poem pours into the all.
The poet is a God when he writes his poem. The moment of creating is the divine moment -- when I am on, when my innermost emanates, there is nothing that could be compared to me in all the universe, I am without equal and without other, but am proud as the sun and as laughing as the stars laugh in their twinkling eyes.
The definite ambiguity of the poem, which requires intelligence, immense sensitivity, and careful devotion in the reader, which is fully invisible to a scientific gaze, or the eyes of a fundamentalist, does more than appraise the reader of its worth. All objects when rightly seen are also a mirror. By reading that I come to know this. Wisdom is finding analogies between experiences. The poem properly read shows me the poems I already am, and the poems I might become. Art seduces you to beauty: art exists for the transfiguration of the beholder's soul. Indeed, the artist's soul transfigured in the production of his work: for that moment, he is, properly is, his full being leaps forth, the Tao water of his innermost necessity kisses the Logos sun of his conscious will. This mystical experience -- I think there is no other mysticism at all -- may be encoded or distributed in a wide range of genres or forms. But when something new is added to the cosmos, a new order is created -- this is the miracle, there is no other. The miracles of the religions, the gospels, the magic of the gods, the healings of Asclepius, are miracles only in that people believe them. The art has convinced. The events that never happened yet open events that do happen: awe and hope are created. That, that is the miracle, not what some impossible godling did when nobody is looking. The addition of a new idea into the world, a new name, a new experience, enriches the world -- how the air is already thick with heavens and paradises, of hells and Hades, of Elysian fields and the halls of Valhalla, and many other dimensions of being we have not guessed at -- so we can drink down our love like honeyed milk, angel's milk, and hum into the joysong of the all.
My storm kicked ship was battered to splinters
I grasped the immortal veil who swam me safe
Wisdom in pigtails led me through rude crowds
Her childlike form left me in immortal gardens
of Pears and Figs ripe every season, a fertility
No hated winter could fallow.
I called to the sea of Lux: "Open your mouth, and give me your words, words from your heart, sweet melodious words from the tender of your heart. I followed the advice of old: befriend your betters and learn. The old gods I quickly overstepped, but the poets who sang those gods were deeper and cagier. "Be students," they advised. "Better to be ignorant then a fool blinded by his favorite truth." What is man but a self-reading book? How long will men envy their machines, the factory working green at the persistence of the belt, the accountant enamored of his calculator, the lumberman lusting for his chainsaw, the yuppie sporting a car instead of a personality? When will man be sufficient to himself? I would tell you of Lux and her mane, but the awesome one in pigtails has barred our sigh with the folds of her sacred mist. Was not Hermes rightfully the father of writing, pure logos, with his cultic wand nothing more then a pen of ink -- such holding the occult powers to hypnotize man to sleep or wakefulness.
I follow the black threads through the library, my skein of love drives my quest through Ariadne's labyrinthine ear, till I discover the door of the innermost, the center of the universe, the belly of the triple headed beast, and read that curious warning: "To what the door will open depends on the bent of the key that turns." Yet how long can I pause when I would heal the wound of longing? You say I equivocate, but a boulder must be rocked back and forth before it has the momentum to thrust past its bounds.
Empedocles may have been the only philosopher passionately worshiped as a God in his own time; Velada too was received as a God in the flesh; Montanus the Phrygian managed to incarnate not merely the son, but the whole trinity in his person, not a few tyrants have hummed the ditto: "Is it pride? Is it grace? I will run the human race!" and all of them might readily have shivered over the apotheotic words "Let us have nothing now which is not its own evidence."
Heaven is made of promises. But so what, money is made of promises too -- the very stuff is nothing but promissory notes, infinitely deferred the way the French approach meaning, so that of the economical system, we must resort always back to Red Hen Justice: you may eat the bread if you put work into its making. It takes nimble toes to dance out of traps of society. What lithe legs to leap worldly gulfs -- aren't those toes and legs traps in and of themselves? Was not the buck who praised his horns later caught in the chase with his head snared in a thicket? If wisdom is the sea, the mother of Hermes and Christ, she the holy spirit of our internal inspiration, which saturates our emanation, so that we are ever pregnant with new life to the universe, must we not, for integrity's sake -- integrity is richer than money! -- refuse those arms, as long and melodious as the necks of swans? Always act so you must respect yourself. We are tempted to ever greater and thicker experiences, for how else shall we enhance our art, and where else do we feel as divine as in our art?--but do you here the siren song: I'll steep you in love and bake you in warm affection, I'll salt you in kisses and pepper you in pecks! I'll garnish you with tickles, and dress you in hugs." Did not the hunter grieve "I sought a buck, and lost some doe." We too will be penniless for all our work, yet we will resist the temptation of bliss, and spurn eternity -- do not sell your soul to get into heaven! -- but we demand not merely to create art, but to be art, to be the poems we breathe. Is not the innermost a name? Are not its abiding emanations a poem? Does not the being of each of us resonate a new energy nowhere paralleled in the universe, or if it could be paralleled, only in a same of our being, a sister of our heart and a brother of our blood? What you stammer in public, say loud in your heart: my only duty is to my own.
Duty secures intimacy, and happiness waits at the door. Though Love refuses the bit -- love is always a transgression -- yet to be loyal to what I love I must turn that energy called freedom into a new energy called commitment. I can only commit to my own: you others are leave in your place -- what knowledge do we have of each other? We have the same truth but different tempos, the same experience but different tropes. Our music you cannot hear, but if you could, would you not learn that music plays passions beyond reproach? That the poem is the justification of all science, all religion, and all philosophy? Though she precedes them and inspires them, so they make exact what she merely suggested, they must return to the source, dip their heads back in the womb of their beginning, and become again poems. One is most strongly punished for one's virtues. Does not the Allist cry "I am a new revelation, my mind the eye of the all! Ama plethorabyss loves my soul and embodies herself in my flesh!" Who would understand him? Who could? What could I recommend that man or woman but: boots for thistles, grace for dismissals; the ass doesn't know much, but it knows how to kick, and the donkey prefers straw to gold. Let their criticism inoculate your from the fiercer critic: yourself. The delighted are delightful, happiness inspires, all the world loves a lover. Yet there is a danger when the world seems to praise you. Could we not even say that a virtue praised is a virtue lost? You are at war here: be direct in love, indirect in war. The goddess is a playful child, because she doesn't care. She knows her business and tends it well: the opinions and truths of foreign minds she lets tend to themselves. For perfection looks flawed, fullness seems void, justice appears crooked, skill looks careless, eloquence will stammer for effect. Don't fret what they say: Shoulder suffering and embrace love. Be free of spirit and you buck the spirit of gravity. The softest mane gallops over the hardest earth. So speak truly and act natural, while attending the nature of truth -- the intuitions of your divine soul are the truth of truth. But we've been whirling like a twister! Where was I hoping to arrive?
Oh Lux! Receive my grateful tears, and steer my fated bliss to kiss and spill my love into your pregnant belly, fat with the love I have poured into you.
Like the cauldron of Charles Ives, where music against music stacks deeper into the subtle tone, the occult and esoteric melody, amidst the confusion of voices and images we hear a child's tune, a simple melody, some eerie reminder of an impossible joy we must have once felt yet can hardly remember now, as when I wake from a dream in the morning so full of an impossibly deep joy and innocence that I for a moment imagine I have finally arrived at that heaven I've been for so long creating.
I speak of the forgotten poem of our soul's conception, the merging of orgasms that was the birth of our being, the infinitely textured energy of the name of our Self. This every poem gestures at, and all poems are stanzas of The Poem.
Life becomes first beautiful then eternal
perfectidius.com
The mind of intelligence versus the heart of love
Transcendentalism seems the purist state of mind, and those who achieve it feel it’s worth to be self-evident. They do not know why the masses of men prefer their world of pleasures, work, scuffles, and such. Immersionism would be the opposite ideology to transcendentalism, adapted by those who seek no ideology: to live in the world, to fully participate in it, to enjoy what can be enjoyed in life, and avoid what should be avoided as much as possible. For an elitist, listing to a pop-song on the radio is not only boring, but annoying: the same refrain with the same lyrics and the same instrumentation of a simple chord progression is not only repeated over and over, but sometimes repeated twice in a row. And yet the pretty young things dance and sing and love it to death. Any philosophy that excludes the pretty young things isn’t worthy practicing: Socrates knew this. What are we to make of the class warfare, the only true class warfare, not between the rich and the poor, though that is often a symptom of it, but between the intelligent and the average.
What is intelligence, anyway? There are differences in brain structures, difference in education, and these change a man’s experience of life. “A man is what he thinks of all day,” said Emerson, but then, Emerson was the kind of man who thought all day.
Perhaps the difference between higher and lower intelligence is best expressed in terms of space. Intelligence is a need, a compulsion, a brain apparatus, that seeks space, separation, a “pathos of distance,” a need to be alone. This comes back not only to a feeling of fear, which uses distance as a defense against influence and presence, but also a power, for fear, when matured and mastered, becomes power, which feels proud and strong. With this step we are thrown back on our basic dichotomy: love and power. Power is the ability to control and maintain distances, love is the joy of intimate touch. No man could be found who was only power minded or only love hearted, but each of us has a pattern of emphases, not simply of power over love, but power in these regards, and love in those: this style of feeling makes up the attitude of man. From his attitude, he builds his thinking, his beliefs, and his beliefs inform how he speaks and what he does.
The psychologists identify the social needs of man to be important and to be loved. These again boil down to power and love, and on the infant forms of power and love, fear and desire. The aristocracy will always be the few, for only few people are strong enough to survive alone, or with small company. Most of people feel as Whitman felt: a love of life, an immersion in it a willingness to call the fruit peddler and the prostitute his brother and sister. This feeling of love for mankind, a brotherhood of mankind, this is not a need felt by intelligent people. Just the opposite. A man of strong will and sharp intellect developed those things from a sense of pain in the presence of crowds and throngs. Such a man builds his self worth not on his acceptance by others, but his pride in himself. He feels that if he is accepted by others, and comes to enjoy that, he must therefore behave in accordance with the expectations of others: for if somebody praises you for something, they are implicitly condemning you insofar as you stop doing that something or don’t value yourself in terms of it. Both praise and blame are equally distasteful to the higher man.
The needs of the intelligent are different then the needs of the loving – though neither of them lacks some of the needs of the other. A strong man seeks respect sooner than affection, and what affection he receives is not promiscuous, but given from somebody who he respects and admires. He is harder to impress. He sees fewer things as beautiful than the loving person, but the beauties he finds are much more exquisite and intense then the loving man.
Even love is not only love. if I love a thing, I fear its corruption. If I a love a woman, I fear anything that could hurt her. Love has a skin of hate, for love is by nature sensitive and is by that fact vulnerable. If it doesn’t protect itself, it will die, or grow calloused. It is characteristic of the intelligent man that his love is much more intimate and tender, whereas the loving men, because they are more promiscuous in who they love – some are willing to love everybody who will receive them – necessarily structure their love to exist on the surface: their heart lacks any depth. They take you as you are, don’t judge, and are easily satisfied. This is warm, friendly, serving, but it is not a deep, intimate, subtle love. Such a love is only possible among the highest intelligence, just as the greatest power is possible only among the wide masses who work, think, act, and feel as one.
The intelligence have distance and need distance, intelligence is distance, a sense of alienation is most welcome to a great individual, and this is Thoreau, who spent most of his days walking alone. But to the democrat, to the lover of mankind, to Whitman and those like him, it is among men that they feel happiest.
Within any group, there is a group spirit, an ambience, that is established when the group starts breathing as one, the tempo of its heart, its movements, its thinking come together. At churches and sporting events, dance halls, and national assemblies, the fears of the loving man are lost in his sense of identity with the crowd. The sneers the intelligent people bring against the lovers make no dent on his heart. He is a sheep, he has a hive mind, he is a follower, he has no identity. If you look at the popular religions these insults are taken as words of praise: we are sheep, we are members of one body, we follow God, we are servants.
Intelligence seeks cleanliness, the way Nietzsche sought cleanliness. Intelligence is a mode of patience, and its use gives a sense of superiority, not only to others who don’t use it, but to themselves when they don’t’ use it. The very word “intelligence” means “to pick between,” and implies the spreading out of something to pick out parts. The same sense is used in the words “science” which means “to cut apart, and “understand” doesn’t mean to stand under, but in the old sense of the word under, to stand amidst, to stand in between. The very eyes and their vision (from which we get the word “wisdom”) act as beams and dividers, whereas the ears take in everything at once, with no distinctions. The spirit of a people will come from its ears, but the wisdom of the individual will come from his eyes. Indeed, love is a language, not something you see, whereas truth is a light.
To call the loving men “lower” and the intelligent men “higher” does not imply a value judgment, but a relationship. The masses support the intelligent exceptions, they are lower, and the intelligent men rule over the others, and see farther. The higher make distinctions, and feel themselves distinctive, whereas the lower like to feel they belong, and no man is better than anybody else. It is interesting that Jefferson wrote the phrase “all men are created equal,” when he was clearly an aristocratic elitist in his own eyes.
Dionysus was the god of wine and revelry: wine was the menstruum that brought all together, and the orgies were a mixing through love: the formless flow unity is expressed in this. Apollo is god of forms, and shoots with arrows any who act out of propriety, as he plagued Thebes when Oedipus accidentally acted out of bounds. In Christian terms, we say that hell is pleasure, the melting of all together in bliss, whereas heaven is the place of intelligence, of the platonic pure forms. Hermes, the god of boundaries, is also known as a genital god, the god who separates boundaries, and because he sets them, he also has the ability to transgress them with impunity. Hermes was thus a god of writing and math, but also of trickery and bandits. He was a psychopomp, one of the few gods who could travel to hell or heaven without being stopped. He was called “the word of god” “the logos” and “the messenger of the gods,” because he set boundaries and made laws, but was not himself constrained by them. As god of symbols, he was also the god of sleep, or hypnotism, for the effect of symbolism is to put certain faculties to sleep.
To slip back out to quasi-historical figures, the four major religious types are codified in the persons of Odin, Confucius, Buddha, and Jesus. Buddha practiced meditation, and sought absolute nonattachment, Jesus practiced faith, sought attachment through brotherhood and passion, Confucius recommended exact traditions and sacrifices and family propriety, of knowing your place, whereas Odin was a wanderer who invaded every place – he is the penetrator, and his spear passes through anything without resistance – and so he is the seeker, he seeks every form of wisdom in order to ensure his son Baldr will come back to life after Ragnorak. These four types express again the problem of distance and intimacy, different ways to codify it, to allow certain intimacies and prevent others, to preserve certain distances and build barriers.
If you build defenses over your heart, psychological defenses which also live in your body, then you lose flexibility and are slowed down. If you lack any defenses then you are quickly killed. How to be wise in all this?
How to knit the hood from the Nemean beast
Whose pelt was impenetrable by weapons of man
Unpiercable lion, and so strangled to death
Eros can always suffocate
How to knit such organic impenetrability
But with Gungnir, the spear of penetration,
The third eye of Odin, which could not be resisted?
To sew a hood, knit together with Gleipnir
The thread of breath lover soft and invincible as fate
From my hood the wink of heaven
Seeking the nothing lie of Satan
To master annihilation
I must give birth the the dancing faun.
What to call this invincible robe, that lets the intimacy of friendship but blocks the arrows of criticism? I call it irony.
What can’t be pierced can yet be suffocated: love needs distance or it will squeeze your life out.
The higher men, their families and communities, seek distance, and have fewer children. Intelligence doesn’t need sex to feel loved, doesn’t need to box to feel proud. The lower people are violent and sensual, but the higher do the same things on a higher level. The spiritualize all things. Their boxing is a battle of wits, their love is an eloquent poetry, a union of hearts. They have less children, but the children they have the take greater care of. The lovers as masses must traumatize their children to be part of the group. This is welcome, to be so initiated into the grouplove, but it comes at a cost of personal identity, of intellectual conscience, of nuanced sensitivity. They come to need indiscriminate love, rather than refined intimacy. They fear science, which is by nature violent, but they fear all power, they think love wins every fight, that love can cure anything. It was Thoreau who said charity fed the problem it claimed to oppose, and that “for every hundred people hacking at the branches of evil, there was only one cutting at the roots.”A thousand rough blows are nothing, but the smallest puncture in the right place is certain death.
The finer arts require periodic injection of crude elements. These groups interrelate, coexist, they evolve together. They hold prejudices against each other, they do injustice. The ultimate comic book villain is no brute or monster, but some evil genius, superior, distant, proud. They can hardly speak each others language. No matter if they all use the same words, they mean different things by them. Language is merely the clothing we put over the limbs of experience. Two people can talk because they share the same world, the same set of regular experiences. For the misfit – an intelligent person is always a misfit until he matures and realizes who he is – there is nobody who can understand him, nobody gets it. He says “I feel this” and those around him say, “oh yeah like the other thing,” and he says, “that’s not what I meant, not at all.” It seems an introverted and intelligent son will be finally unknown by his own father and mother, and that the poetically brilliant daughter is pitied by friends of the family, who pray for her soul, for they just don’t get it.
Intimacies and distance, these are the basic stuff of the mind. For the intelligent person, he seeks distance, he seeks private experiences, meditation, reading, writing, art, anything where he can be alone with his heart and mind. The others who get nervous alone, scared, maybe even suicidal alone, such a one must seem at best peculiar.
~
Perfection is Easy
Time is now
Apotheosis welcomes
Eternity Bows
~
www.perfectidius.com
The Daemon
Every man is born with the power to heal himself and make himself sick, though the process is mostly unconscious and rarely is mastered by the consciousness. There are gurus who can slow or quicken their pulse, cut their arms and make the blood flow or not flow. These prodigies show us what is latent in all of us – though it has all the attractiveness of circus shows. There are many ways to master the self, and all of us come to master ourselves – the fishes, the dogs, the criminals, and the saints.
Faith healers of all sorts, from Pentecostal Christians to Freudian Psychoanalysts give us a story that impresses us enough to learn what we might have done otherwise. Dreams don’t have a Freudian meaning until you’ve read about Freud. At that point you internalize his id demons, your unconscious makes the dreams he is supposed to have discovered. A Jungian patient has Jungian dreams, a Freudian patient has Freudian dreams, a Scientologist has no dreams at all.
The unconscious has a sort of intelligence to it, and this we know: schizophrenics can talk at length to their voices, some of them positively love the voices, others are absolutely convinced they have a demon, and are tormented by the “temptations” it throws at them. This is truly a difficult challenge to live with. But it is potentially our problem, it is a part of the brain we have.
The facilitated communication devices which became a popular way to reach autistic children let those children and adult shave meaningful conversations and even write books: the facilitator helped them guide their hands on a keyboard. Not only were there parents impressed and gratified, but the facilitators fully believed and believe in its method. In double blind tests it has been proven to be the facilitator communicating, perhaps unconsciously with a weejee board effect, and not the patient at all. It is not harmless to hope. Some parents have been imprisoned based on the testimony of sexual harassment that arose from the facilitator’s unconscious.
Automatic writing is old news: William James, in all his materialism, was interested in how a person may unconsciously write and communicate while the conscious mind is attending something else. With all the weird things we can do with hypnotized patients, such as getting them to believe they are not hypnotized and acting in inexplicable ways, we know the brain is conscious not only as a whole, but also in parts. Usually those parts are in communicating. With patients who have had their corpus coliseum separated, one eye could see a funny image and the person would laugh, but the right eye that did not see the joke would not be able to explain the laugh and would make something up to explain away the laughter.
This tendency to rationalize when we don’t know the truth, to invent memories and reasons for our behaviors and really believe them, and to convince everybody else of them, is another word for “sanity.” The pervasiveness of this behavior led Freud to the extreme conclusion that all conscious behavior was smokescreen. By misunderstanding the situation, Freud was thereby able to see some unique truths.
The placebo effect is nearly as strong as most medicines. Up to 40% of cancer patients given placebo chemotherapy lose their hair. If that is the case, how much of our relationships, our job, our family, our life is based on this strange mind over body experience? And can we control it? And if we can, how? And to what extent would this merely be learning to juggle: a skillful way to do nothing productive?
Theories make truth. Christian Science works because it is confident. Faith in yourself moves mountains, but only the mountains you’ve unconsciously set up anyway. It would take science to drill a tunnel through a mountain.
Just as governments take your money and then want gratitude when they do things for you, so do the religions wish to give you spiritual gifts and blessings that your own soul can manufacture on its own, if only it new its own power.
~
Perfection is Easy
Time is now
Apotheosis welcomes
Eternity Bows
~
www.perfectidius.com
Daniel Christopher June to the students of life:
Greetings—
I just picked up Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil” one of my everreads, which I will analyze all my life, along with the essays of Emerson, the poems of Whitman, and the philosophy of William James. I have found a plan for the work, some metaphors by which to approach this book and consider its relation to itself, to all Nietzsche’s work, and to world history. The book can be read esoterically – and this essay hints how.
Take care, Caretakers!
Beyond Good and Evil
Beyond Good and Evil is Nietzsche’s most historically important work. His Zarathustra was merely a sign language to the ideas first solidified in here, and the Genealogy was merely an extension of the ideas first codified here: and yet each of these three branches diverge from one point on one question…
What is the place beyond good and evil? Considering the philosophical technology of trinities, and especially the trinity between Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, Nietzsche is making a perspectival point. This book, amidst its many topics and discussions, in only an esoteric manual on how to interpret. Goodness (the notions of good and evil) he gets beyond, “Truth” he gets beyond, for the apex of the pyramid is Beauty, that point of view from the mountain top, Zarathustra contemplating his brother the Sun, as Strauss set to music. The viewpoint of the sun, that is where Beyond Good and Evil, Zarathustra, and Genealogy of Morals share a crux.
Will to Power is a mode of interpreting: beyond Good and Evil and beyond Truth is the point from which he will interpret all else: in terms of power – what power? The power to be and make beauty.
The preface of Beyond Good and Evil addresses Truth as a woman unimpressed with philosophical dogmatism. Is dogma repudiated? Rather, the dogma, as codified best by Plato (and in a vernacular voice, by Christianity), pulled the bow of Europe taut. The tension he by no means repudiates: he sees its use, the ability to fire upon the farthest goals. Who wishes to release the tensions? Two groups have tried: Jesuitism (Catholicism), and democratic enlightenment. These two represent the lower points of the pyramid: Catholicism which holds truth like a dogma, and democratic enlightenment which makes morality the opposite of power. The will to power does not deny these tradition and answers their power and place: he sees them not exoterically, from below, but esoterically, from above: how do they fit in? What use can they serve to the Creator? And who is on the third point, beyond good and evil, beyond truth? “We who are neither Jesuits nor democrats, nor even German enough, we good Europeans and free, very free spirits – we still feel it, the whole need of the spirit and the whole tension of the bow. And perhaps also the arrow, the task, and – who knows? – the goal ----“
The first books – “On the Prejudices of Philosophers” “The Free Spirit” and “What is Religious” – disarm the problem of truth, the “epigrams and Interludes” fires a round of arrows to clear the ground, the second set of books – “Natural History of Morals” “We Scholars” “Our Virtues” – disarm the problem of Goodness, and the final two books – “Peoples and Fatherlands,” and “What is Noble” – take us to the heights, the powerful place of one who sees and makes beauty, the place beyond Good and Evil.
To create a new thing – all of Nietzsche’s ideas are modes of one single idea – Nietzsche had to break tables, had to break the tables of letters and laws and values of other forms. This is the central image of Zarathustra, which must be taken as the central branch of the Nietzsche’s world tree, though everything expressed their was expressed in a different way here. Zarathustra created a type, Zarathustra as type: the fruits of this branch would be his Ecce Homo, where he takes himself as type, and Nietzsche contra Wagner, which did the same. Genealogy of Morals brought the fruit of the Antichrist, the work which excoriated the notion of good and evil, Twilight of the Idols grew from the Branch of Beyond Good and Evil, addressing especially the problem of truth and morality.
After identifying honest as “our virtue from which we cannot get away, we free spirits—well, let us work on it with all our malice and love and not weary of “perfecting” ourselves in our virtue, the only one let us.” Such is necessary for the will to power, to be bold like Thucydides and not cowardly like Plato, to see reality for what it is, to see it from every angle and every perspective. In this virtue, truth and goodness are not negative, they are merely looked down from a height, they are seen esoterically, not exoterically.
The Translator Kaufmann, needed, perhaps, to justify the ways of Nietzsche to man, after the Nazis, seems to write his translations against the Nazis, with footnotes to every reference to the Jews, with quotations from all his other books on the topic. Nevertheless, Kaufmann, because he was a professor and hence a fool, jumps on the moral bandwagon of cultural dogma that claims Nazism to be one thing and only one thing, and that thing completely and utterly wrong. That may be a Jewish interpretation, that may be an American interpretation, but it is not the Nietzschean interpretation of will to power, which is far to subtle for such categorical stupidity. To see problems as a physician does, to see it from the height, is not to dismiss complex things as if they were simple.
It would seem in such a section as “Peoples and Fatherlands,” that no Nazi interpretation of Nietzsche is possible. However, one must beware of his criticisms of the Germans or his praise of the Jews: Nietzsche is anything but simple minded: he is more sublet than his interpreters, his truths have not yet been plumbed.
This section begins with a high praise of Germany via the music of Wagner: manifold, formless, inexhaustible. Germany is profound. Unlike the Jews, Germany is not a strong race, for it is not one race – this is the deepest irony and strongest paradox in all of Nietzsche. The problem between decadence and the grand style, the ultimate question in all of Nietzsche – this is an aesthetic question, after all, the most important question that we can ask. The next section, section 241, mocks the previous section by saying that petty nationalism is a stage, something to get past, something to resort to in old age, but we must think globally, or in Nietzsche’s language, we must be “Good Europeans.” Germany was exactly this by being the soul of Europe through the music of Mozart and Beethoven. Because the Germans were so manifold, they could be the soul of Europe.
Democracy isn’t fully repudiated, and his repudiations are subtle. Democracy, which levels mankind, yet breeds tyrants. The democratic citizen is by nature a slave who calls himself free. This was and is European history the last three hundred years – the “leveling and mediocritization of man – to a useful, industrious, handy, multi-purpose herd animal – are likely in the highest degree to give birth to exceptional human beings of the most dangerous and attractive quality.” He speaks of the tense bow.
Sections 244 – 249 address Germany, which he citizens, and in other places seems to hate, but only because, really, Germany is the model for globalism. Note that the section on Germany does not end at 250, which discusses the Jews, but continues till 252, which discusses the English (in condemnation), and then the French (in praise). It is not the Jews, but the anti-Semites, who are most dangerous to Europe, he says, the anti-Semites who should be removed, and the Jews should be allowed to do what they want to do “be absorbed and assimilated by Europe, for they long to be fixed, permitted, respected somewhere at long last, putting an end to the nomad’s life…should be noted well and accommodated: to that end it might be useful and fair to expel the anti-Semitic screamers from the country.” That this didn’t happen did cause a Ragnorak for Germany, created the state of Israel, and ended the Jewish blessing over Europe. Only in America were the Jews “absorbed and assimilated” (this does not mean made nonJewish), and so America, which he doesn’t bother to mention in this section or much anywhere, becomes the place of “Good Europeans” the integrated people which he dreamed for Europe. That Europe can still aim for such a synthesis is upon her now.
The Germans were and are the type in Europe for this synthesis, because the “German soul is above all manifold, of diverse origins, more put together and superimposed than actually built….As a people of the most monstrous mixture and medley of races, perhaps even with a preponderance of the pre-Aryan element, as “people of the middle” in every sense, the Germans are more incomprehensible, comprehensive, contradictory, unknown, incalculable, surprising, even frightening than other people are to themselves: they elude definition and would be on that account alone the despair of the French…The German soul has its passageways and inter-passageways; there are caves, hideouts, and dungeons in it; its disorder has a good deal of attraction to the mysterious; the German is an expert on secret pathos to chaos.” The danger of Germany, as he sees it, would be for it to “descend to mere fatherlandishness.” He of course criticizes all of this in section 246 via a critique of German styles of reading and writing – but of course Nietzsche is the unification and apotheosis of the German style: what he does here is everything.
The English and French are then mentioned, who, if mixed together, come off almost German, but are used as examples of what to avoid (the English) and what to emulate (the French). After that, he returns to his purpose of this section in 255 and 256, beginning with a note on German music, the soul of Europe: Europe must be unified. For those great minds who invented the language of this unification, invented the spirit of it, he lists Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heinrich Hein, Schopenhauer, and Wagner, and finally addresses Wagner’s great failure, his Catholic sensibility. Nietzsche wants to unify Europe without Rome. Siegfried is the type.
The final book, the pregnant book 9, defines the nobles, the nobles who will rule Europe, describe their nature, their code. Nietzsche is a “yes sayer” whose tastes is “the taste of intoleration.” Any simplifications, any summaries or polemics for or against Nietzsche would not be truth, would be dogmatical, would not use the will to power. It is useful to see that Nietzsche’s spirit lives with us still, abides over Europe, inspires her best minds, is still working over world history.
America, which so perfectly embodies many of his ideals, yet avoids a literal reading of him, a misunderstanding of mere tropes as opposed to esoteric enlightenment of deep sense – or in other words, a fundamentalist reading.
Emerson, who is the mind of America, and Nietzsche’s master, had this to say regarding nobility:
Aristocracy is a good sign. Aristocracy has been the hue and cry of every community where there has been anything good, any society worth associating with, since men met in cities. It must be everywhere. T’were the greatest calamity to have it abolished. It went nearest its death in the French Revolution, of all time.
A little later in his journal he writes;
The common conversation that takes place in a city for a year does not embrace more intelligence than one vigorous thinker might originate; and he who carefully considers the flow and progress of opinions from man to man and rank to rank through society will soon discover that three or four masters present the people with all that moderate stock of conclusions upon politics, religion, commerce, and sentiment which goes current. The kingdom of thought is a proud aristocracy.
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Perfection is Easy
Time is now
Apotheosis welcomes
Eternity Bows
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