A note on rhetoric
Live on wine. Like Odin, drink only fine wine -- you need no meat or bread when it comes to literary matters. Least of all read commentaries or books that make you sick. Do what you love to do, read what you love to read, and what speaks to your soul return to again. Twice is right. Find the infinite onions, and digest them eternally.
The rhetorical lush and flourish of life is having the beauty of truth. Some have the edge of truth, the ugly of truth, and they insist all the louder because they have, after all, the truth, but they have not found the beauty thereof. They haven't found the rhetorical angle to expose its gold.
Anticipation exaggerates -- use such devices to confound. A little ugliness can delay the face of beauty, and make her coming stark. Some truths can only be sought indirectly, angels dance out the corner of your eyes. Beautiful necessity will give you a hint of the way, as the veil of subtlety catches on the hard nail reality. All of life is the making of truth, and suffering is only the lesson. There is no oppression, only configuration; find the violence of necessity and throw it against the hard; let the soft remain pearly and rose.
We develop a rhetoric, we try the tropes. All those overly artificial tropes have the effect of trying to impress -- sometimes an appropriate affect. Onomatopoeia is a late etymological addition, to color language when a tongue comes to grey; a little onomatopoeia zips a sentence. Use all the tropes you wish, be sophisticated in such matters. Be like Kvasir who took the poetry off every god's tongue, and in his blood became the inspiration of gods and men. Or abide by Odin's return through Baldr: he took in and set everything in a wider frame. He never intruded or insisted; rather, he suggested. Often enough, he answered a question with another question. He made gods and men, giants and dwarfs feel that they had been helped to answer their own questions. Likewise, be subtle as a sigh, as lasting as history. It is the envy of evil which destroys the world at Ragnorrak, just as it is the evil of "righteous" who in envy destroy the world in the apocalypse, where the Messiah fuses with the four horsemen as the white horse of death. Such is the continuity and sustained uniformity of their world envy.
After all, things beget their opposites. Kierkegaard's greatest contradiction was to claim that Christianity was based on, supportive of, welcoming to individuality. This is oxymoronic. No religion is primarily for any sense of individuality. This is this, and alone will be, I blast to hell all Christians, Muslims, Jews, Mormons, Buddhists, and Taoists on this account; they expect you to love the divine more than yourself. Let them explain the true source of their conviction, if you would learn from them.
When the lie is sensed, the liar grows loquacious. See how they yammer the most when you touch the underpinnings of their faith, those points where they perjured themselves. The fool always wants the last word. Because Jesus spoke with authority rather than reasons his authority was continually challenged -- and his fantasy of being the king of the Jews cost him his life. True wisdom does not "Speak with authority" but makes you the listener feel empowered. "How do you escape an overwhelming emotion?" the humble wish to know. With even breathes, open acceptance, allowance of violent expression, and a deep love for all that is human, every affect can be expressed. Can an intelligent person be tricked about the intelligence of the person he is talking to? The other may play stupid, but who can play smart? A man who can speak a bit of Chinese can trick fellow English speakers -- they will listen to the little he knows and are willing to believe he is fluent. But when faced with a truly fluent and native Mandarin speaker, there is no hope of deceiving such a one. What? Will you affect a stutter? So too does a man who knows not bother with those who "Speak with authority."
Every rhetoric is a metaphysic, its words are a metonymy of the universe, a world. A personality is a center, knotting various rhetorics, a set of speaking styles. Personalities are strategies and rhetoric triumphs by persuasively formulating the competition's rhetoric. When you can anticipate the language of your opponent, when you can speak his side better than he, and parody, there is little hope for him. Let him go into solitude and again find his voice. And knowing that you cand do so, make the smallest gesture at it; the truth will be felt by all.
\ ~@M@~ /
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