"Cracking Open a New Anxioform"

Based on what I’ve learned from the culmination of 9 months, as my son is due any day, and the attendant anxiety I’ve had with this and my new job, I was inspired to write one of my most personal essays. It mingles theoretical ideas with how I’m using them personally.

 

DANI

 

Cracking Open a New Anxioform

 

 

Upon the Last Days of a Long Nine Months

 

Silent as we wait in terror

Frozen by our fear

Psyched by worry and discouraged

We neither see nor hear

 

So sing a lie, Sweet lisping sighs

Jaded though I am

The river rises, gives surprises

To a man who cannot swim.

 

Emilie is free and laughing

Happy after all

She's blessed by Pan, so nothing tragic

Ever could befall.

 

My frame is bent, a grounded kite

My tail is knots and twisted

The wind she swims with savage whim

Her NO is not resisted

 

I fear that I fear -- that's cowardice

I stew and rue in silence

And cast my eyes on a hundred books

And hide in freedom's license

 

Like sun to tides, whom moon abides

I take my place in a three-legged race

I try to be your harmony

And trip in graceless grace

 

I hold the clock and pitch the air

When my house descends I will hear them snore.

And I'll ascend to my basement home

And triumph till past four.

 

The triumph in your eyes to me seems to see game's end

I could sue you for presumptions

Interrogate assumption

Strange missives will I send.

 

The slow-tone lull of my sleeping dolls

Frees my limbs unfrozen

Duty day never goes away

This love life I have chosen.

 

Pomegranate family blood,

Hold me to the core

In love I gain my everything

Bring Ama to the fore.

 

                Emotions are music, adding vitality to ideas, making language. All language is poetic. What is poetry but musical language? The use of trope and music make the language evocative. What of anxiety in love, the anxiety of love lost, the rejection of the beloved, many forms of love's opposite and attendant: fear?

                What is in must out. There is no wisdom in damning fear, or hate, or anger, or attachment; we are thus equipped because thus we need. The trick is ever the same: to make use of what is: the optimization of optimism, making this the best of all possible worlds.

                Anxiety is a game, it's part of the game; it holds its use, it does us good. Scientology, for one, learned to whip their enemies with it; from auditing each other near to breakdown they learned how human beings in general can be broken down. Continually interrupting the desire to speak leads a person to a fit.

                We care, and caring can't fully be owned. If I love another, I am vulnerable: what happens to her happens to me. This mind's I, this care, which is focus and release, which is energy of selection, expresses anxiety as tension of focus. The self-help gurus and the religious are doctors for this anxiety, their plans and holiness answer it, even increase it to draw us in. This is no objection, but it is equal across the board; this is one of religion's moves.

                Psychologists and psychoanalysts and all manners of leaders often have suicidal children, but that need not be taken as an objection -- that Anna Freud killed off her first two child patients need not be taken as an objection -- just as the philosopher can teach valuable things about the good life without embodying that goodness. A river can't rise higher than its source, so why listen to the self-help gurus who after all are only meager self-help gurus, a flimsy clownish race? In this, we must remember Confucius: the wise man is not ashamed to learn from a fool. We are the students of life, we learn from every direction; we are no respecters of copyright.

                This anxiety, when it pertains to the unknown danger, really pertains to our own stance and posture. Being caught off guard, and unprepared, is the object of anxiety, which therefore bars full engagement in the task at hand.

                Government and religion would render us harmless, cooperative, productive, and content -- such dreams are utopian nightmares. If anxiety is really anxiety about stance, then the mind, which is already a focus-filter, filters even more, concentrates its range, knots our muscles and heart to avoid our brash. Showering water melts my anxiety away, gulps of water melt my depression away. I relax knowing that this mind evolved and developed for the best of reasons. To identify with something, a goal, an outcome, is to put energy into it, to suffer what loss it suffers. We are empowered and yet exposed by caring; the further out we put our hopes, the more anxious we become. These religions, with their remote terrors and ineffable promises -- how can they help us now?

                We realize that there is a subtle difference between, "I feel upset because I am thinking about this" and "I'm thinking about this because I'm upset." Our moods, after all, could be caused by biological processes unrelated to our psychological situation, but the psyche nevertheless interprets our anxiety in terms of itself. An angry wife recalls a list of forgotten grievances because her mood summons them; the depressed man is surprised at how horrible life has continually been, and wonders how he could ever have felt otherwise, and if he will ever feel happy again.

                So you set up a list of things that offend you. You're deathly afraid of that one dumb thing. Face it. You can see it, so face it. A success here is a success everywhere. This phobia is a lightning rod for fear.

                No amount of planning can anticipate every exigency -- in fact we should expect continual surprise and occasional emergency, but in all these situations, fall back on tried and true universal principles fit for every possibility. No matter where I'm at, my virtues are eight. Will is success. Chance is nothing compared to this.

                Our instincts know what to fear. Blood and snakes have deep untaught instinctual affects. That is why the creators of religion adopt them as symbols, to lend their terrible effect to religious dogma.

                We use anxiety. Damming back select expressions, reservoirs will reach their peak. I monitor my moods like a diabetic monitors his blood sugar -- with similar results if I fail. That is life for the bipolar. I learn their tricks of use.

                I hold to those eight, my virtues, even when my system languishes. Walk the world as a startling contradiction; if nobody pulls their weight at work, you will; if nobody loves with all their heart, you will; if friends or family don't act kindly, you will.

                To replenish the energy needed to do a thing, the unconscious prepares itself, like a well of fuel. A man who has studied intently for his chemistry exam can still play a decent game of chess, or do something else whose energy is replete. Our energies are open down some paths, not others.

                Our anxioforms are the muscle-forms that set our map and path. You are free on your path, anxious off it, like a dog with an electric collar. When one is in a mode, his will has taken a shape, the differentiated energy has been stationed, and some other forms of energy have been converted, he has taken on the character of his task and locked in. To step out of the role, to unlock, to come down, requires a purification process, or some other action or time period to ease the knot. The anxiety of character that poses a man to his task tightens until he suffocates-- he needs to withdraw to rest.

                And so the body takes a stance held in by anxiety. How then to be a God without struggle?

**

                The knot is tightly bound, like a thick ball of fishing line. I am no Alexander, I won't burst the thread; I know how to soften the knot, how to smooth it open, how to give it shield; I know that intimacy must be as guarded against as adversity; pain raises my defenses from every corner. What is done here is done for all time; this is the one utter moment, the central thread of everything. I knit the spider’s lint with intentful hands.

                Use makes wise. We do a thing and we can do it. We train our bodies, we tender those skills; the body is a world; the body is the map of character. Body is language. We face these extraneous circumstances, so many contingencies, we feel we've been cheated. Yet it doesn't matter how unruly the paper piece; fold it in half and appears logical. Repeat a thing and it takes new meaning. Chaos echoed falls into order.

                In sticking it out, in surmounting frustration, in stubbornly marching on, when any reasonable person would count the fight lost, a man gains a heart of adamant, of diamond, of pristine invincibility, which stays for all his life, till finding himself tasked by a deadly emergency, he is not caught off guard, and lost in a great passion; he has the fuel to gain great ends, to realize the ultimate limits of his will, he does not foolishly dream, and then regret which is simply not in him to do in the first place, because one becomes both mortal and immortal in his absolute talk, one inherits the pride and appreciation of heroes, sharing their staunch heart, he resists context, come triumph or failure, knowing chance and fate mean nothing to the smile of a pride that having given its worth, needs no external reward or secondary testimony.

                The crown of whiteness is wisdom's pride. Grateful will we be if we make it to old age, when our scars melt into wrinkles, and our organs drop off, one by one, preparing us to leave this chrysalis. The hammerfalls of experience statues character from our soul--inside this womb we forge our wings.

                When will is effete and pure reserves are tapped, then we inevitably burn out. At that point our performance is deplorable and we should accept it without too much guilt, learning to better manage our time and will next time. A man regrets whatever he fails to put his full heart into. Only what you cast your full being into is worthy of you. No matter what your weaknesses, no matter what the obstacles, if they can be anticipated and calculated they can also be surmounted.

                We call yonder artist egocentric, unreliable, obsessed. He sharpens his will just as you do, he thickens it with pride, ardor, ambition. He reflects on beauty. Reflection intensifies: remember your mirror. Meditate before you work, build wells of energy.

                I smile at myself: I am happy, my life a success, my job the perfect fit, my wife intelligent and the better parent. A man mad and psychologist wed. She says, "worry as you must, but worry constructively." Such thoughts bring me ease.

                Why should I pride in a mere attempt? What isn't perfect is unworthy of me. Let me learn a perfect lesson from my failure and I will walk on. Effort in vain -- utterly depressing, and how my opposition defines me! Life is in living, not merely in making a living, and the future belongs to the adults as much as to the children.

 

O purifying water!

I immense my innards

In clarity's cleanse

Let toxic anxiety

Come to its end.

 

                With my rhythms and pauses, tones and cadence, I come to flow again. Smooth your brow. Let wounds heal. Never seek the impossible.

                "You can do anything you set your mind to" is as intellectually dishonest as "I can do all things through Christ." When we fail to do some grand, "anything" or the miraculous "allthings," who do we blame? Not "the Mind," or "Christ," those superstitious terms, but something is wrong with the "you." We feel comforted that we are potentially omnipotent and are willing to live with the guilt that we fail that potential. The true culprits here are the overstated affirmations. An honest assessment of our weaknesses, limitations, and potential gives us a realistic and attainable goal set, not the hypocritical smugness of an impossible goal. Weak men want to be praised for attempting and failing the impossible rather than attempting and gaining the difficult. Any modest gain is more commendable than an immodest failure, and only school boys and theologians try to outbrag each other on whose God is biggest. What are the greatest accomplishments of men and women? What are the most laudable achievements which alone are worthy of your highest praise? The founding of countries, the creation of philosophies, religions, and science, inventions of all sorts, works of art which inspire whole peoples. And how were such things accomplished? Not by impossible goals, but in discovering one's true powers. The pious praise beings who accomplished cosmic things when nobody was looking -- that comes easily to the gods anyway, as the grand canyon came easily to the glaciers. This is a misuse of praise. We praise to inspire ourselves to do likewise.

                And so my anxiety is discarded through complaints as these. I strive all day and am replenished by the night. Hoping up the external disappoints. Build what is within, that at last is yours. Don't panic. Plan it.

                I consider my grandiose ambition and my unique sense of the divine and am told, "Daniel, you are on the right track, your truth is pronounced and glowing. You need only hold to it and continue as you have." My gift to the world is in my word, I write out my veins, and this endless production I give to who can receive.

                My first awakening? That battery of pent suspension -- family, God, guilt, and loneliness --, a candle of insulation, kept me cold and grounded till Ama lit.

                We believe in the triumph of will over circumstance, and for the nagging doubts, every fiction is devised to confirm the triumph. I hold to my hope, I the bright unknown. My body is the pen of God, I swoon in Ama's hand.

                Complaint seeks encouragement, bragging begs for beatings, this silence keeps me warm. What great compression, what lyrical strain! Success teaches success. Don't envy; become. Greatness emulates. I join my pantheon of lovers. My polyrhythms fall into sonic turmoil. I grasp the nocturnal root, and work till noon, raise a second dawn upon this noon.

                It is poor praise that kneels. Beauty is her own excuse, I second her in myself.

                Oh former self! Plough your brow with worry, pinch your eyes with pain, scowl your mouth with dredged disdain, wire your jaw with the bite of brass: give yourself over to your worry. Boiling at nothing cracks the pot. Meditate. Fall into her. Does she evade you? The rose its thorn, the honey its sting, the babe its wail, and beauty her disdain -- but not with Ama! Oh Ama! Love for love, my heart returned! Though this flame trembles, his tongue blisters and burns. Let the tongue of my pen unknot my heart, unblossoming my rage, understanding what I don't.

                "Ignorant mankind! You have what you need, yet go abegging!" Those hopes were impossible from their own monstrosity. Envy is ignorance.

                Most of these allays include an exultation and a love call. I am like Mattria, who in the beginning, at the zero of history, made endless forms of art within the womb of her brain, at the zero of history, which burst over the wide in myriad forms -- universe of creativity, all from the substance of her flesh. Nothing comes of nothing, all comes from all. I remember my plethorabyss. I remember that quiet young woman who once visited my heart. She was seemingly seemly, fairly fair, pretty pretty. Ama brings her to my mind. Never a word again from her, but her one word was everlasting.

                I am taught my anxioform, the shape of my anxiety and potential panic. Nothing calms me like my reflection. She speaks to me. My ear the peapod holds your truths like pearls.

                Anxioforms, or the situations of utter panic, can emit a shadow of invisible dread. We move with sincerity, in calm and ease, utterly avoiding them but perhaps without ever meaning to. Those things we might laugh at, but they become asymptotically intolerable as we approach them. The human trajectory is so barred-in by phobias and our pride is so allergic to cowardice that we don't see our hidden bent.

                My tongue drips with this rich and tension-filled language, the inbuilt tensions and contradictions are the dynamo. It contains living history. I send these missives to you in love. I'll envelope you in my arms, address you with love, stamp you with a kiss, before I send you on your way. My heart is home for you.

                Drop all obligations, anything that binds. Only when you've given up everyone and everything do you find yourself. When you've given everything, you can finally give yourself, the first genuine gift.

                When entirely engrossed within the importance of a thing, our physical frame and the mental framework it implies, takes on its anxioforms or limits which, define its breathing space and its timings. A set of time-frames -- every culture has a set of time frames, from which we learn to set up our expectations. We grow impatient at the supermarket not if its busy as usual, but if it's busier than usual.

                Media installs these anxioforms -- not everybody takes them, but we all can see those who do. Curse words don't even need to be processed -- the effect is immediate. We specularize a few cultural phobias and traumatize mental anguish to those who fall under it. A few traumas on the collective conscious hollow out creative space.

                O doorbolt of sunrise! Don't interrupt my loving. Ama, with your ingenious perception and incomprehensible depths, remind me of what I already know. Oh moonsetter!

                I talk to my friends, the missives come in pulses, and I ease the tension by making awkward admissions -- a sort of concession to buy myself time. I am never myself, I am always going through something, and I am only happy when I'm inspired. I write to you in despair or delight.

                I've long lost the smothering mother and the exacting dad -- those forms were weak to me. I am always in you and through you, the pinnacle of everything, my darling unknown. You tell me that the opinions of the wisest are wrong, "Hold to your own." You open my mind like a book, you read your favorite passages.

**

                Oh Allay of curious construction, oh endless origami, of infinite onion! Let me dive into the national types, the types of men each nation invents. National types are as physiological in their character as they are in attitudes and beliefs. How to find my own type, within these anxioforms?

                Repetition and the use of daily life for topics bring me closer to my want. I feel ready to emanate the next step. Is there some hardness behind these over-gentle gestures? Peace drapes and conceals. Look at yonder moralists in their poisonous poise. No, serve only yourself. Escape the darts of their eyes. That morality over the heart -- our passions are doubled by it with the angst of suppression. I will not be defined by my opposition; this form is coming to the end of a long nine months.

                My anxiety is a map through my body, bringing me to a truth that only now is ripe. All my pain is anticipation of writing, all my joys writing: and now I am writing a son. The bow of my brow, the arrow of my eyes, return as I gaze in my mirror. I nose through books, I must have passed this way long before; I find pieces of me wherever I go.

                I, time weaver, braiding in reinforcing breaths, mental asides, soliloquies, annotations, mental snacks. I come to a new time.

*

                Kindness is bringing out the beauty in another, love is a relationship to beauty, respect is a relation to power. Politeness is to treat others with benevolence when love and respect are undue. Science with its womb-peeking can't see such thoughts I'm brewing now. I become the Allfather. Let the world whip us for our virtue, I won't seduce another into praising me. Writers hope for better things than applause. I seek a new form, I am a new form, something new under the sun, and better still, I am a new sun.

                Footsteps sound like kettledrums to the novice thief, and the apprentice magician can hardly believe such obvious tricks work; as I creep upon my future form I am just as giddy. Have the courage to be perfect.

                Only a man who has gone insane knows how completely shaken self-trust can be. Self-doubt is the true hell, the loss of any God bearable.

                To get outside your own head, to put a shard of your ego into the mind of another -- how alarming and fascinating to see the world through another’s eyes. We inwardly criticize all other points of view merely to maintain integrity. When we are confirmed in our truth, we can drop defensiveness, but to allege that a man should do so before he is able, what audacity! Expecting a man to empathize before he has his confidence sounds like religious presumption or moralistic imposture.

*

                Oh the muchness of my writing -- no friend could read as fast as I write.

                The body is a language, a nexus of languages. We publish our being into the world. A character is a map of anxiety, and in this anxiety is good. This use of egotism to hide social anxiety -- necessary for my state. How often I read with a fenced heart and scream out my eyes at the books that I hate.

                The fish dance for the net, not for the fife; none will exult with me, but many will afterwards. They follow the teachers, but how tedious these teachers: they are either preaching to the choir or lecturing to the drowning. Follow the firsts. The first is supernatural, the second natural. Push it to the crisis! Those who try with all their strength therefore ever can, those who don't can't.

                Spend your time with the timeless, pay the price for the priceless -- it is a child's whisper in the back of your head that gives you the final key. Full of flow, let yourself go. Such tragic nonsense as the world reports is amusing when it befalls others, but tragic when yourself. So embrace the trauma. Look at that frittering nerve:

                "Anxious waking, angst at work, woke too late and done too slow, anxious love and angst in parting, anxious to be anxious." Prompt love and easy employment -- never a poet did boast. Give it up.

                I give my whole to my love of the All. If the world would receive me -- but if not I at least am sufficient to myself. What more can be said? People never shut up about the ineffable. "Silence is golden" say the fools. They'd do better to say nothing at all -- for there is golden silence and there's silence that screws the thumbs. Find a talker, learn to marry well.

                Receive in silence that silent gift. The Giver gives nothing -- that is his secret. He knows how to take.

                Pure divine, I put my word on your face, I the father of a son, mercurial wonder, this coming of being, my mountain breaks the sky, I am the fountain to Luciana's star, her visage is thickened, she pays me respect, I the pen, and you, Ama, the ink; this Idius our son, you and me together. I am equal to the chains of time, I bend them into paths. I can do the dreaded thing, I storm the face of dawn.

                Self doubt is my dynamo, the deltaic triangle of creative growth, the tension of my bow of directness, the repetitive spiral of my studies; I give myself over to her, to self doubt, my Luciana, and yet I resist. Shivat! My self-doubt has a name. She eternal engine of greatness -- ever daunts me on. Ama in this aspect is terrible indeed, but I am equal to it all. Some days and months to harden this down. What then is my new name? I the Raiser, I the Former, I, fit to fit, take the name of Mariwel.

 

 

 

\~ @M@ ~/

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