"the philosopher and his family" (continued)

The philosopher and his family, continued

 

Part 2

The glorious lotus arises from the sweltering mud; the seeds of the fruit tree germinate in manure; the ancients believed the gods spoke through madmen; the grandest odes were penned by carousers and drunks. There is no paradox in any of this; it is straightforward and obvious: a thing grows from its opposite. Some good things can be created only in bad circumstances; the matrix and its energy must be just right for the conception of a thing. Were the energy different, the conception would also be different. Wondering what my Idius would look like if I’d remained a bachelor is food for thought, but nothing to regret. Whitman’s one regret was that he begat no children. There is a wholeness in the experience of fathering children that matures a man and brings him to a wisdom otherwise impossible. That this or that happened to me is pure chance. That something like this or that should happen to me is utter fate. I’m here to grow, I suffer so I can learn, and this life, the Game of Life, is the toy world and chrysalis for a higher apotheosis, either as an angel serving some other God, or being the God myself, in full radiance.

So when my peace is menaced, and my distractible mind is crooked forever back to the tasks at hand, I scowl and fume and wait for my time. I feel I’ve been swimming against the river, and exhausted now all I can do is float downstream.

So I come to the sacred place, the room of creation. I charm the room, singing my hymn, charging the air and the tools with my purpose. I set up the resonators, those few objects which I’ve made into relics. I clean the lap of creation, I set the place in simple order, I stretch and then I begin.

I reflect with my mirror, I pick up the threads of the day, I tie them into thick discourse. I consider my children. Emilie the emulator, laughter of my life, you will one day take yourself as seriously as I take myself, as the utter divine. To lead you to see this fact – that is the crown of your education. I consider the rest of my family. I consider my readers – so few! And why? They never say it, only half know it, but they can’t finish your books because they despair of them.

Yet how can I keep writing? My body is my pen, but I feel my ink has dried. Involved reading proves impossible during the day. My family demands continual intermittent attention – how to focus? -- plus my pronounced ADD, which has cost me jobs, distracts me, unless I trick it into working for me. “Anxious and distracted,” my mind falls fallow. How to return to the Aye of Eye of I?

I crowd out the day by loving the night. I squeeze more hours into the womb of darkening delight. I enjoy staying late, the only time I am truly alive. The day is stress and pain but the nighttime is delicious. I fall into God-ease, my wording flows naturally, supernaturally. The morning will bring the yellow net of dawn, to keep me atask till moonlight sulks and pines.

Should I lament the loss of a day of duties? Should I give the evil eye to my daily joys? Cynicism gives both sight and blindness – certain facts become visible, others hide away. Rather than struggling with what is, and wishing for, loving, believing in what isn’t, what can’t be, I must try the full of possibility. What we thought impossible becomes a miracle to overcome. We think riding to heaven on a horse is a miracle, or walking on water, but those are magic tricks. The true miracle is becoming what you are, in doing what you didn’t think you could, in overcoming your own limitations. I come to expect more of my days.

I feel I should apply myself, to be fully present. Wherever I am present I am also absent. The world dispels my energy, scatters my force. My every drops from my outstretched hand, bleeds in the form of expectations.

I am bound to this family, and my ink of love is thick as blood, binding as the vow unto death. The world does not see how it lessens its being through perjury and perjury in love. Intimacy is precious, love can’t be bought. If you bought love it would be something else you got, some pretention. Jesus couldn’t make friends – no equals embraced -- but Socrates made friends with ease – even being the more intelligent of the two! Why then am I like Jesus and feeling no deep sympathy? When I draw close, others flee.

So I keep to my all, and the mother speaks. Her words fill me with lasting conviction and enduring certainty. I come back to my Idius, and am ever at work. I’d hate to feel I left anything out. Only what you always do can you do perfectly, so while I run my rotations throughout the day, the iterations and permutations of my doings that resemble in their improvisation a line drawing, I gain moments, niches of wisdom where my fluid philosophy rolls and gains the depth of wells and springs. I the bright unknown, hammering the same bits of trope and formula till I at least perfect them. I write sentences during the day. I edit them in my head as I work on this or that. All this work comes to very little, a precious very little. The Idius is a cosmic scaffolding for a tiny eternal diamond, the unbreakable, the all-cutter. I say the same thing to five friends and arrive by repetition at the perfect phrase. I epitomize by repetition and concentration. A tight set of universal formulas is the epitome I seek; 4,000 pages of scaffolding for a single page sublime.

All the pretense and attempts count for little. Why claim to know what you do not? Even if you impress others, you will know the truth and must take their ignorant praise.

What shall I sacrifice to the muse? Can I consider Beethoven’s words, “I certainly could not marry for to me there is no greater pleasure than to practice and exercise my art.” Yet even this marriage gives me persistent frustration, useful to art. “If Petrarch’s passion had been gratified, his song would have fallen silent.” The fullness of love is for Ama alone. I would be her face for the world.

I know precious few people, I edit away a few. Let your friends be your garden. As Odin lives on wine alone, I live on the best of conversations: symphonies and silence. Profundity loves a mask, and I am every layer of mask.

I keep at it, loving the materials of my art, as every artist must: the sculptor massaging his clay, tasting it. I pun the words, I etymologize them, I hum their tunes and melodies, I learn music. My dancing pen is ever at work, and if every life injures me, I inseminate the wound, and am blossoming with life. My multiple selves fall into metamorphoses, and one by one become gods. Toys become tools, boys become men.

I fit this role, I father my children, but I feel unlike others. Does the world feel my difference? If the axes mock when the scalpel visits – should that surgeon’s sword be sad? I remember my place, I remember my infinitely dense mantra: Perfection is easy. I am not with Buddha and his “cut all cares,” not with Jesus and his “resist not evil.” It is well said “the man his job, the woman her child,” yet this passionate writing is sex with Ama, and this work is our child.

I stretch my hand, I make a few intimates. My friends are colorpots, I brush up to each to make my canvas. Introverted though I am, I speak. I am either outward flowing in exuberant creation or inward taking in assimilative study. I love intensely a few close people the way the fire marshal burns a patch of undergrowth to make an ash barrier against the forest fire.

My family is the flowers my psychic feet taste, and my winged joy delights in their love. I want to pour my spirit into your hearts. I would love by intensity, by claustrophobic intensity, seeing only and always the same few, known and finally known – repetition is my wisdom – to get past the facts to the principles of meaning. Let us spend time in each other’s attention, my loves. Even pressed so close, I hardly know you; I would know you closer. For every situation is a womb – it can incubate such an idea impossible at any other time. The overlap of resonators evokes exactly one name. Will it conceive and will that conception come to term?

Never fret. Virtue echoes. So stick to your task, though all the world outpaces you. Attempt, repeat, triumph. For courage is insisting on living on your own time in your own space. Courage is setting the space and its borders, blocking in intrusions, in above all keeping your pace and letting no one impose, neither family nor employer. This selfishness is the highest virtue. Insist on yourself. Pay yourself first. Tend to your garden. Find that garden in your life, that small matter which is yours alone. It could be as miniscule as a kitchen table, so long as you can own it and dominate: what is the kitchen table but a node of the house where a confluent of forces come together? The body of every house has a few nodal points, which like the center squares of a chess board give you the controlling advantage.

Hold to your own, for the most selfish is the most universal. The mind is two circles that at rest overlap: when one draws in, the other moves out, so the closer to your center, the one the farther you reach out with the other, till at your centermost the other as at the edge of the universe. If someone believes, all believe through him. Deny duty. Hold to your own. Stare down the moral tone, be not intimidated by the name of goodness. Create and be happy. Heaven is the image of life’s creations – sure enough. Did not the all create countless works before they were scattered across the cosmos? What is your room of creativity but the same room the Mother used when she created every form in the universe, before she burst them across the wideness of space? Above morality and duty and love and vows and bonds of obligation, I am I, and owe utter priority to that being that is the basis of all my becoming.

Be present to your family, of course. Be known, but not comprehended, be present, but not accesable, be dependable but not predictable, be kind but reserved, be certain but not argumentative. Write 1,000 pages, share 5 lines.

Behind, my wife, is Ama, the Ama she is, the part that shares her nature. I warm to you. Your pearls of truth fall into my ear like peas in a pod. If the angels are known to make love for fun, then what is all my Idius but endless love, endless dance of amoration with my lover? Work and love together make passion; and the passionate purpose justifies all, justifies, and puts everything in place, sets it in order, makes it simple and inevitable. We live chance and chaos, but from above it is lines and circles, simplicity, necessity. Thus I handle this chaos too; my higher self, my higher mind, nudges me a little, smiles in warm regard, and I am with them, I feel it too. And in all my life, I’ve never been happier.

**

                O thou Gods, well have I wrested and pinned you in the depths of your pits! Every sacred weapon I’ve trophied from you. The pits are the men and women, priests and priestesses self-unknown who were filled with your game tokens – ideas tight as symbols, and they possessed and inspired by the gist of your game. My willing blood turns my limbs and am made beautiful in my fury – “beware of beauty,” Greek wisdom – while my white hands knit eternal names. I take each matter in hand and let each finger discern its metaphysical heft. Your golden truths remain with me still. Nothing golden leaves. I cast a glance of slanted light, my very shadows are bursts of light, and I tug at these chains of the great, morality.

                I glance at Ama, I feel my weight. The color of your blushing cheek rhymes with love-succumbing sun as she kisses the earth. I defy the gods, your many masks, with their minds of winter, who in their exquisite boredom startle at my bold.

                I’m shining high, weaving threads of my sun my semantic verbs – the spermatic chore of bulging earth and the world with troubling hopes respond to me. In all my gifts is more than matter, I add metaphysical substance, a knit of meaning; I give intentions, programs and progressions. I give givingness.

                Buddha the unbeing of mind, Christ the idealized man, and I, the IoIoI, the fullness of being, the everall, consort of Ama, trope-star, daybreaker.

                I humble away in the sigh of the night and am racoonish. I raccoon steal the moon—certain theif, my face is already a mask; I chitter of heavenly gossip while my glittering eyes absorb the stars. My hunger stomachs all; I wriggle up the shade of night.

                That is one of my ways, some of my days. On other days, with arrowed toes, I dance the skies. Diapered mornings, pliered nights. I turn my eye to this promising friend: I dare to hope in you, investing care where care might fail. I take you high. I give you a lick of divinity, as honey from a blade. Ah, this ego flight of glorious heights, in cloud-climbing ambition, as I bury kisses into your bosom, while we eclipse the sun. I take my cock stand, to roost and rule, and come to brood over my children.

                This guilty hidden wishing for an accident quick and grim to take this infinite infant, this perpetual child, to unburden me of duty’s chain, would miss the opportunity of Ama’s nativity in whom greatness awaits – ah, Ama child! Catalysts of chrysalis. I embrace my daughter, I embrace my son. I absolve me to my place, and remember my vow unto death, remember these children of life.

                I repose in a time of stillness … that time is with us still. The endless black, warm as breath, Mattria’s touch; I will dissolve in love at this body’s death, and then my chest will open like a husk of the milk weed’s pod, and my feathered seeds will burst over a world of good.

                My mind sighs down from its rabid beauty, of kicking stars like sparks from flint. I settle into night, drink the wine that is my tongue, and demure to the pure glissando of nodding peace. I am where I belong, in the place of power. Sacrifice is investment. Gardens of glory are bedded and ready to grow and surround me.

 

 

 

\~ @M@ ~/

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