Tuesday, March 6, 2012

some notes toward an essay on "the distance of genius"

 

"The Distance of Genius"

 

 

                The central needs of mankind, with the core of material needs that necessitate themselves first, make every people's primitive years approximate the others. We would expect the same if high culture to be somehow wiped out (a favorite fantasy of Hollywood and the pious). However, a group is a group; all groups resemble each other. We all answer the same needs in similar ways. The genius is the one who can accomplish two things: expand his portion of culture a sphere above, and also link it back to the vital core. On his wings, high culture flies a little higher, but having grabbed that star from its sphere, he finds his way back in the fall of innocence, when freedom returns to necessity. With the genius a deeper necessity meets a higher freedom.

                Living in our modern cities, where we think we need cars, and the politically interesting distribution of their necessary oil, we have an abstracted society. I can work a 30 minute drive from my house, and drive back and forth each day. Of course this would be impossible a few centuries ago. Technology does what it always has done: distanced us from nature. As eating cooked foods led us to evolve an inability to eat raw food; as medical marvels allowed our weaknesses and deformities to thrive, so that most people must wear artificial lenses to see at all; so is every man more and more alienated from nature -- surely the best age to live in under the auspices of our dawn. With distance is freedom. Freedom is power, and power is the opposite of love. How then to regain the intimate touch, with all this distance? The psychoanalytic alienist who would analyze us further and farther apart is no help: they merely packaged their private fantasies as universal science. Religion is often helpful, but the pious are a mockery in all the Universities (which stand for man's relation to the Universe). We need a wisdom free from such sneering assault.

                Occasionally the criminals, the insane, and the criminally insane instigate immediate contact by direct violence. By violating the distance and shattering open an intimacy they give us something to look at, worry about, care about. As we judge them, we share in their experience. There is such bloodlust in justice. The reality television shows about cops and court cases and biographies of killers will put the lie to anybody who disagrees. We are voyeurs to the criminals; they are the darker celebrities, but they put on no less of a show than the angelic idiots who star in movies.

                The man of genius must be innocent of all that. That is, he must experience it, understand it, immerse, and then transcend. This is the worst of the world, the dirt we wash off in our daily showers.

                We make our whole lives a symbol for our truth; our life is the beautiful representation of the meaning we are and give. Genius is always the breaker of the limits of the heavens, that plucks a higher sphere from the celestial order, and brings back a new spiritual technology for his fellow gods, and later, for the people en masse. It is necessary for genius to build a higher heaven, grab its spermatic light, and fall into innocence, impregnating the purity of the inner hell with a new divine. When the circumference and the center kiss, worlds and orders are made anew.

                The universe was not created by the word, but by the music, the singing and humming of the Mother as she knit her being into the full glorious All. Intimacy emphasizes resonance, distance emphasizes cacophony. To get distance, a man may fixate on one small problem. Friendships end over a stupidity. But that is pretext. The real reasons are spiritual and final. Perhaps in that moment of stupidity I put a bit of my soul in your innermost. It is necessary we now fall away.

                The genius is ever distant from the common mind. The common mind is necessary, is even beautiful for what it is. But wisdoms taste ignores the call for humility, that ugly arrogance and patronizing pretense. The trope of those self-righteous imps mouths "I'm better than you, so when I act humbler than you, you should be truly humiliated." Those who bow deserve to bow. Those who stand will forever stand.

                The genius is in his flesh an eternal gift to the world. He does not bless the world, he is the blessing to the world, to heaven, to heaven's heaven, to God, to the gods, and to Ama, who is all of them. The shining one gives the logic, the language, and the story. The world gets the story simple enough, but doesn't pay attention to the language, the students get the language but don't get the logic. The philosophers get the logic, but don't get the meaning. The mystic gets the meaning, for he already knows it intuitively. The meaning, the logic, the language, and the story. We only see what we are ready to see. Who blinds us? Our own ignorance. Why does our ignorance do this? Because he is wise. Our omniscience clouds us in ignorance, because our soul is not prepared for the full light. We must in our being equal the greatest light. If we opened our eyes too soon, we would be followers of some other life, be followers and worshippers only, and lose the truth and possibility of shining higher than God and Being in our own growing self. The meaning of the mystic, the logic of the philosopher, the language of the poet, and the story of the hero: when we embody them, we will coincidentally see them in the world. For the one who claims he has, don't believe him. Perfection is no boaster. What God would want to impress a mortal? Beauty needs no praise, and Ama needs neither men, women, children, or plants to worship her: she is self-sufficient. She worships us. She leads us to join her in her exultation. Her kiss is the gift of exuberance.

                See that shining one? His eyes are a shield of judgment. We pull back and hide our shame when he passes. Those silly angels I am always falling in love with: their whole transcendence is in the lilt of their neck: by flitting their head afloat their neck, as if bobbing on thought, as if their mind were not part of their body, they too float through the world, and nothing ugly can reach them. When pain and ugliness does touch them, it is not their angel it touches. They are on that level always tranquil and focused. I cast eyes at the angels, and they follow me in entourage across the rainbow bridge.

                Understanding is acceptance. My brow is always the square of structuration. Do they laugh when we say such things as this? This wouldn't be true if they failed to laugh. They huddle in the shell of their own religion. Religion is, after all, organized importance. What is important? Whatever one patterns his life on, the basis of his life, that is his importance, no matter what he mouths in other directions. Mouthing pretenses is also important to him--what a man does exposes what he believes; his words only seem to confuse matters, unless one knows how to hear. Our will to power is in incorporating what the enemy has left out, of seeing what the others have blinded themselves to.

                The genius is an outcast, but that is merely the story of those who think they have cast us out. We walk in and out, we cross heavens and dimensions, and no world can bar our path; they say of our whimsical jaunts: we guide it, we cast them out, we pay them, we support them, we allow them. They are like the kid who commanded the setting sun to disappear, and then boasted throughout the twilight that the sun had obeyed.

                The world belongs to the ones who own themselves. The brave inherit the world. The Gods create new worlds.

 

 

 

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