"Wealth" an audiobook of Emerson's Essay

 

I’m recording Emerson’s set of essays “Conduct of Life” for librivox; it’s a long tedious task, and I am putting parts of my work up for consideration on my own webpage till I’m done. Today I finished “wealth,” the third essay in the group. What Emerson says seems to me quite revolutionary, it still makes immediate sense today in our own economic sense and our sense of employment. I also think that this essay especially should be read across Thoreau’s “Life Without Principle,” as the two men are mostly sharply differentiated on this issue. Poverty is best for Thoreau, but Emerson sees every man in his proper place as rich.

 

 

http://perfectidius.com/wealth.mp3

 

\~ @M@ ~/

perfectidius.com

 

"Writers block" an allay

            Writer’s Block

 

 

            Life is writing. Health is editing. All good living and health is the flow of ink; all illness is some form of writer’s block.

            There are just a few indispensible songs on my playlist. How they came to me and how they moved me, I am uncertain, whether fate placed them on my path, or whether chance accidentally dropped them there. They are forms I repeat indefinitely, they open congested channels of energy that flows into beautiful circuits, they unblock me.

            How do we get past gridlock? How do we dissolve the block? How make a bypass? What music opens the soul? What dance? Spiritual suffering somatizes – that is how we escape. By translating our problem, by leaping planes, we get around it. Mind becomes body, body becomes mind. Jumping registers opens flow. We need multipe goals we can toggle.

            A powerful lead is balked and blocked, faces a dam and can’t express its necessity, aching though it is, until it finds a teasing inlet, and then bursts through that detour. The tickle of indirection must first make same tentative initial contact with the desired, and then it can flood on through.

            In the past, men wanted shortcuts to believing in themselves (or in themselves through the gods). Miracles were alleged signs that a man ought to be obeyed – but truth needs no such theatrics and beauty is self-evident. Only deceptions would require the miraculous for substantiation. Yet that is breaking a deadlock, getting through impossibility to real possibility, the only thing that matters: what does life look like when I believe and act this way? What miracles amount to is illusions and insanities that let us break past an impasse.

            Art too breaks us past impasse. Ideas work on ideas – that’s their operation. But all forms of art can be made into analogies for ideas, and show us how to interpret other things. Part of the mind, the metaphorical mind, sees all in each. We must build the confidence and courage to burst the knots. We must find for every challenge an analogous precedent.

            With our equation liberty is fear is power, we take fear in its most glorious form, courage, for liberty belongs to warriors. “I Ovath, anxious days of endless plight, thunderhunt at Shivat’s mock. Eru soothes my eager ears – the fall of style relieves my years.” This fourfaced Goddess, the Father, Mother, Son, and Daughter, these archetypes that sink the deepest, give me recourse to endless art and miracles. The mythology works magic, and stirs my mind.

            Ink dissolves mind. The ability to write, to fill Facia, my blankbooks, with endless ideas, is so much solvent. I am able to bypass my blocks, my various blocks, by toggling my attention, by letting my stomach dissolve the fat diamonds while I attend my lessons elsewhere. Practice is key. One must be patient as time. Impatience is the baby huffing himself into a fit, and you must be statue still. Where courage falters, pride insists. We must devour our fetters, and make their strength our strength. In our allform, that language by which we comprehend all – in writing for instance – we ascend all mundane constraints.

            My womb is the American melting pot, I assimilate all forms, I unite them in to the allform. In this, no block is permanent, for my philosophy is fluid, it dissolves all obstacles. I take my problems before the mirror, I reflect. My inner well of silence, my organ of stillness, quells with volume –narrowing away the frittering worries of daily life. A variety of words present themselves to write and include, I am ever tempted to use them. I choose around them. The place of silence drowns all distractions. The immensity of my silence as the inner sea neither heeds nor disputes, but wordlessly absorbs and comprehends all. Here the very air is music. I can front the facts because I have frozen distractions.

            I am all, my ways allistic: I can be both, I can be either. My greatness owes as much to my foolishness as to my wisdom, as much to my crimes as my justice, as much to my confusion as my certainty. Every vector places me well empowered on my path to triumphant bliss.

            The energy wells from my soul, always the build and release, always the dam and overwhelm, always appetite and satiation. I am expressed, I am spent, but wisdom lingers. Simplicity is best, those few stark words, the epitome of all word-tomes. They remain with unconquerable rectitude, the sparse phrases knit and penetrate all worldly forms. I braid my way through books; I live in books. A few voices, my wonderful readers, your undulating love, my Lissidy, bring me back to the necessity I purpose towards. You are the anodyne to my solitude. I share with you the gamework, the playwork, the relaxed intent. What matters in this is that we persist. Persistence is success. And greatness is impossible without a proud ego. Being proud of our ability to create is being receptive to the greatest power that can well from the inner divine. Proud means podere, to be able. The well of energy, my reader love, my proud ego, are the dimension of my game. The play of my game is surmounting obstacles towards my goal.

            The deadlocks are built in. Our fantasies are deliberately made of impossibilities. For frustration waters the well, it gives us rivers. We set the friction, we build impossibilities, we dare impossible dreams. That is why we find an external enemy: what a convenient strategy for integration! Nations do it. Religions do it. And so we differentiate ourselves. We enjoin our days to a labor independent and proud. We oppose this person, this party, this system of thought, and are set in an external deadlock.

            We build deadlocks into the system, impasses, and dream what we know we can’t have. I am materially grounded but spiritually soaring. I wish my friends to have dancing days, such dancing days as this!

            Impossibility is a trope, a trick. But necessity opens possibilities for me. Necessity is the mother of invention, genius the father. Not just anybody can unlock a romantic heart. The words must be known by intuition, as natural as breath or step. They must be necessary and fatal as life and death.

            The flush of wine unstraps my throat and the wine is love for you, Ama. I fall into you, fall into innocence, I swoon for your love. I am powerful for you, I walk strong, I insist, always to impress your loving eyes. All my writing is finally for you. You are the win of my game.

            Living is writing, and all writing is a braiding of voices. What is any block but writer’s block, and our body the pen of life? Life is a play of language, congestions, and flows of force and words.

            We set up these blocks to build pressure, to incite inescapable strains. Genius is only genius because it needed to be. The child who is simply and readily loved, who easily gained what he wished for, would never feel the necessity of genius, the direct course, the direct path of genius, possible only when the rest of the world is bent.

            Deadlocks, gridlocks, impasses, frustrations, desires for the impossible, set the stage for fantastic creations, for art and words nowhere before conceived, with elements that could only fuse under incredible pressure. A long belabored frustration is the best gestation. The final release, the orgasmic melding of ideas, to have those melds, those epiphanies, the dancing to muse song, is the highest joy possible to man, higher than sex or romance or any other breast-heaving bliss. This is self creation. Through the creation of a careful, minute, eloquent langauge, we knit our very soul, knit it eternal. Without writer’s block, none of this would be possible.

 

 

 

\~ @M@ ~/

perfectidius.com

 

 

ritual and stability

Ritual and Stability

 

            Rituals accomplish two things: they ground us in a regularity, thus giving us a sense of predictability, expectancy, and control; and they allow us to participate in a metaphysical fantasy, which adds an ethereal tone to the rest of our life.

            We build rituals to make a platform. We need, first of all, a material platform, as earth is the anchor of heaven. It is true that in 2004, prior to breaking free from work, family, religion, sanity, I dreamt the goddess spoke to me from the aspects of Mother and Father. They were both unclothed. She said “I approve of all you are doing.”

            Having that incentive, I was able to find independent housing, get funds independent from my parents, escape the workplace, the family, religion; and amidst this I was able to find the wife who would utterly ground me for my mad flights.

            Emerson’s inheritance from his wife Ellen’s death gave him the material platform to drop the clothe and be his own man. He did not need it, but it helped. Getting my own freedom saved me from family, from working till I had breakdowns, from family proximity.

            I had already given myself over to Ama – I was in the divine, but now I had to come to earth and set my nest. Her kiss for me was bold as a promise: there was no explanation, no need to struggle – my heart said yes.

            The muscles move because the bone does not. The eagle flies because gravity pulls her down. We anchor ourselves in regularities, in what we can count on. We build these things up through habits, repetition, and ritual.

            Language is made of experience, language the magic of control. Our tone is our maturity. Converting experience into terms requires intuition, reflection, and deliberation. To sink into the center of a mastery’s tone requires many careful and active rereadings.

            Lissidy, my readers, I really feel to kiss you. Your touch is soft as grass. I gain a sense of love, which is habitual pleasure, and I build upon it, I grow. My power breaks free from it, I defy it. Genius is the endless amplification of a systematic disconnect. If the circuit was sound we would be modestly happy in our smallness. Genius needs a reason to exert such incredible energy. It must be necessary.

            How to prime the dancing pen of the conscious mind to render its purpose? We must know all the controls, in foods, friends, images, sex, names, activities, ideas, locations, possessions, music, which nudge and shove us into exactly the right spot for completing our task. Whatever our situation, that situation is best for doing some work. Knowing what that work is lets us make the best use of the situation. Priming the mind for the work it must do, we set rituals, make incantations or affirmation, we use all the subtle psychological tone-setters.

            We ever have our sacred language, we always have a name for Ama. An apostate does not at all lose the sacred langauge he had learned to us. He expresses the repressed self-criticism embedded in it. Our secret loves and hatred are just as learned as our open. Racism and nationalism and every sort of prejudice, good and bad, fills us as if absorbed unconsciously through the skin.

            Emily Dickinson, for all her female sarcasm and closeted disdain, had to make her daily life utterly predictable – no love affairs – so that she could squarely face her great dread, her heavenly anxiety, of which death and immortality are subsidiaries. Indeed, us homebodies with the deepest heart give a flowing of a soul that surrounds the family – a spiritual presence.

            Charles Ives wife said that he “fixed it so I could understand it somehow,” could appreciate  his difficult music, making her into the Victorian wife who gives herself up for her husband’s art. “If I had done anything good in music,” he said, “it was first, because of my father, and second, because of my wife. She urged me on my way – to be myself. She gave me not only help but confidence that no one else since father had given me.”

            We choose our mates to anchor us, to open and allow us, to give us a chain of predictability, grounding so that we can dare mad flights. So often we don’t know religion till we know romance, as religion is exulted romance. This was true for Ives, anyway, and just as true for me, who learned the name Ama from the human daystar who opened my world.

            How do we build an anchor, an insurance, a buffer, our resources? We need anchor points. Utter freedom is possible with a minimum of utter slavery. We need gravity to fly. We choose a constellation of certainties – our lover’s eyes, the very “I love you” that is endlessly affirmed, a wake up time, a sleep time, a favorite book, a scripture, all manners of rituals. You are open, in your poetic flesh, to create whatever rituals you need. I myself sing a wake up hymn, and in the shower a song of absolution. I say a prayer when drinking a sweet drink. I congratulate my soul upon falling asleep. I look over the same basic drawings each morning that represent my goals and virtues, interpreting them afresh. I mirror meditate.

            And in this I know how to be my sharpest critic and also how to acknowledge the warmest praise. I reveal my own secrets. Secrets itch to tell themselves. I am open and hidden at the same time in my writing. A great hope leaps every wall. That is how I get it. Perseverance is success. That is how I keep going. I build a few rituals, a few mantras.

            We quest incessantly to discover what can be repeated. What is a nag but a safe territory for a persistent attack? But familiarity breeds content. We can build on what we are certain will hold. We seek that Archimedean point by which to move the entire world.

            Duty and freedom align. Because we so strictly respect the rules we know how and when to break them. We seek infinite points, people and things we can praise in extremes. We wish to pour our heart into eternity. Our love only sought a beauty who was worthy. Directness is an arrow, but we must turn our eyes over the whole scene to get the shot.

            How to believe in yourself? Most believe in themselves through God, through some divine. They project their certainty onto themselves on an imagined absolute. Many conmen martyr themselves to at least prove to themselves they really believe.

            Others believe in themselves by convincing others to believe in them. It is easier to believe in something external than what is at heart. Such people – most people – believe in themselves when mom, dad, brother, wife, husband, chidren beieve in them. They are at last convinced. How to uttery believe in in your own heart – without that? I think you would have to know the divine and eternal essence of your private soul, your innermost self, and know it is uttelry independent and relies on nothing.

            Having chosen a purpose, we can sacrifice all else for it. Having found one thing to believe in, we don’t need to believe in anything else. Mirror meditation, or some reflection, self-reflection, opens us up to the adamentine pins that hold the soul in place. We have eternal wells that ever feed forth new energy. We have our mountain of ascendency. These inner geographies can be counted upon. Let our rituals then reflect them and remind us of their worth.

            Finding the utter lover, the Lissidy, the one who touches your inner worth, that is the prize to fight for, and to secure at all costs, and  to never forfeit, come scourge or fury, nor let any duty or propriety interfer with the words of worth she lisps to your soul. She is the one you deserve.

            Every day is the same day, the regularity is thick as steel. Every day repeated, but some blast of difference is gestating beneath.

            We make life simple when we want to create high art. Like Kant, we make life an utter boring routine. We require solid ground if we are to leap the gulf. By building your rituals, and filling them with symbols of your heaven, of your necessity and purpose, by constantly evoking that set of images and people who are your anchor, that constellation of power that drives a path through trees and hills, we are able to build our resources, to pool our powers, to make use of all those little obsessions and lessons we’ve taken on the way. No effort was wasted. It waits inside of you. It awaits use. Once you find your grounding you can open all power.

 

 

 

\~ @M@ ~/

perfectidius.com

 

"solitude"

 

Solitude

 

People like Whitman, Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Charles Ives, their great spiritual accomplishments were triumphs of intense solitude. Artistically isolated, if not also socially, they were able to create something stark and bare and exulted. That is a different sort of energy than joining the group effort. Solitude is sacred, solitude is divine – the opposite instinct of all cults.

Prophets and founders promise heaven, if not the world to their followers. They become part of a group that exceeds any and all of them: the group dynamism is supercharged. My divinity is not like that, I don’t bring you into that.. I would be a mirror to you, and show you your exulted soul. You don’t know, perhaps, how uniquely divine you are. I myself had to believe in my project when nobody else would or could. Be it madness, be it vanity, it is utter self-expression. People like Thoreau, Charles Ives, Emily Dickinson, Whitman had no artistic peers. Solitude is divine. Yet all those people were sharply and utterly influenced and inspired by Emerson. He is the American God. I am too. I strive in all my writings to be just that, to open inner worlds in those around me, in those who read me. That is my cult, that is my religion, that is my place.

Reflection, self-reflection, is our intensifier, how we sink deeper into the ether of our being. Thus the practice of mirror meditation. But art is another sort of mirror, a magic mirror, with language that evokes the ambiguous and otherwise unknowable nuances of the inner heart. That is why we give ourselves over to our project, why we delight in it, why we delight in each other.

Authors like Nietzsche and Ayn Rand appeal to adolescents, who are glad to interpret their sense of alienation as a sign of distinction and superiority. Having made that stepping stone, we ought not stop. Our self-exultation can be as humble or as loud as we care to make it, but we must believe in ourselves and find ways to utterly secure our Necessity to our Project, to find the expression, the dance of life, that wins us the game.

Friendships open up a part of us otherwise blocked, perhaps painfully blocked. Our cramped desires, that libidinal energy, is freed to flow and create. But if it is not worked into a beautiful circuit, it bleeds out and is gone. We can readily express it into the synergy of free-floating social energy. Careers, churches, patriotism all plug us into a great machine which both energizes us and uses us. Art, after all, speaks to all of us. Drama bypasses handicap, successful art reaches the proud, the guilty, the strong, the weak.

Limits comfort, limits allow. They show us boundaries and propriety. Marriage is a beautiful institution, yet every honest spouse naturally comes to question it now and then. If we wished to annul it or destroy it, we have protocol, we have the normal taboos that will bust it, the laws that will divorce it. We can nevertheleess choose such a playing field to exult and explore our soul and those we love. The becomes a world, a place to work. We each choose a scale to work on. Emily Dickenson in her poems is willing to make a world of the bird that hops and bites a worm in half and flies away. That simple little territory becomes a lens of the all for her. Whitman preferred using the entire continent as his playing space, and his catalogs haphazardly leave nothing out. Emerson’s initial personal journals were proudly called “the wide world,” and he dreamed an angel guided him to eat the entire planet as an apple. Thoreau, meanwhile, makes his epic all about one solitary pond, whose banks will be poetically described, whose ebbs and flow and fish and birds will be enjoyed in serene bliss. What matters, after all, if your world is large or small so long as you can fill it and animate it?

We come to earth to each master time and space, though time and space are ultimately paradoxical and unthinkable in any ultimate scientific or philosophical sense. We structure our personal space, our social space, we give our time to employment, to projects. We master space with our personal sphere and our owned objects, how we move. Poetry and dance is how we move through time and space. Literal dance and poetry is merely an epitomized exaggeration.

Intimate friendships open up the most intense of experiences. Nothing compares. Crossing the border, sharing the space, opening the heart to another – if we can – is the joy of life. A stream of excitements open the possibility, but some stark image is necessaryto  break us into bliss, as a man making love when he hears his name called exults in bliss.

A few people, a tight group of friends, are in league, they feed each other’s soul. When one presents a personal problem, the other absorbs it, suffers it, digests it, and then expresses the solution, either directly or indirectly. We build tight circuits with our desire, and taboos and propriety hold them into place. Having that friend to open us up – there is nothing like it. Being above the law – breaking taboo is invigorating. All great leaders have done so and needed to do so.

Our fantastic space redoubles the mundane sphere. How to reconcile the fantastic sphere to the domestic? Joseph Smith was able to cure a paralyzed limb and cast out demons, but not save his twins from dying in childbirth, or allieve his wife’s intense suffering, or save one of their soon adopted twins from death by measles. I knew a faith healer, an aspiring charismatic healer gifted by the holy spirit. She wished to heal my mentally challenged daughter. She was unable, however, to cure her own bipolar brother who was meanwhile languishing. I recall my own father attempting the faith cure on his schizophrenia, foregoing the meds and thus losing the marriage. I also dream infinite dreams, yet remember to take my meds. We need an ultimate groundwork, we can’t let ourselves be lost in dreams.

To create the heavens we seek, we need an anchor on earth. Independence requires simplicity, a simple and tight set of versatile tools to establish a project. For myself, it is a blankbook, a backpack, a clipboard, a laptop, a minimum of files. I streamline my friendships, I simplify everything. I learn to revolt ideas that disturb my goal. Conscience is really moral peer pressure, and changes and contradicts itself depending on what social group we abide. Different Gods or ideals know on our door depending on where we lay our bed. For simplicity’s sake, I ignore as much as I can, and limit myself.

Whitman had to set limits on himself, on his poetry. He decided to become the Nation’s Poet and then became so. But his homoerotic love met a pitch when transmuted to camaraderie and democratic love. There it capped out. So our shames are delighted in under other names. We require a language, a self-defined language, to manage our shames and limits and excesses and daring. How to express your whole heart, your whole soul and leave nothing out, to utterly empty your love for the infinite beloved. It is a question for Ama, and she gives me ecstasies. I would bring my lovers as close as this, I would express the innermost sublime. I feel with Whitman when he admired the solitary tree – “uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend, a lover near .. I know very well I could not.”

How many of us can like Charles Ives work in solitude on our symphonies, without audience, without milieu, without orchestra, for two solid decades, with only the sincere appreciation of a wife? Or Dickinson, whose entire spiritual world lay hidden in her closet, in her thousand poems she scarcely shared?

Whitman admired oratory, made plans and schemes to lecture. They never came place. Joseph Smith existed only in his oratory and never revealed his heart. Emerson, the American God, managed to both reveal himself and gain popularity.

I become naked to expose you. The hero won’t be mothered, and gossamer tears in a fight, yet I would be both visible and yet secluded. When we are utterly alone, perhaps to the point of suicide and utter ruin, we may consult our spark and know that this is not mere “flesh hanging from soul,” but our being and our place is right, the body is a temple, that we must exult in what we have. Sexual liberty is the outside fantasy of familial duty. Wherever we are we feel the push and pull of being somewhere else. Globetrotters, we would be rooted; farmers we would be treasure hunters. In all this we seek a friend who is all these things for us, through which, by loving sympathy, we do them. Ama, my heart is for you. And every aspect, every glint that comes to me, those of my spark, I warmly welcome you. A word of love? A midnight whisper? I would always clutch you close to my soul, and join you in your solitude.

 

 

\~ @M@ ~/

perfectidius.com

 

"Using Hate"

Using Hate

 

            As a child I was shocked to learn that David prayed to God for his enemy’s babes to be dashed into gore amidst the rocks. Once you’ve had kids, the stray thought of braining one of them is not entirely unknown. So we feel all sorts of violent and terrible thoughts, and the are not merely neighbors to love and pleasure and bliss, but stalk and root of the same plants. In Norse myth the violence of the elder gods, and the army of Hel, the Ragnorak, leave the earth shaken but greening, so that the younger generation of Gods and men survive to pick up the golden gaming pieces from the grass. Can we so rhetorically divide violence from gentility, and rage from passivity? Violence can not be bred away, it is intrinsic, and beautiful in its way.

            We define ourselves against our foils. Philologists are fretful against folk etymologists who gum up the works with their clever and clueless interpretation of language. Religion hated magic, regarding it the lower cult, with power structured in the hands of man and not the gods. We choose our enemies, they choose us, but we must always insist on our rights and never accept abuse, but snarl and rage at our opponents, and this not only for ourselves, worthy though we are, but for the greater principle of justice, of which our personal welfare is our most intimate duty.

            Don’t expect sympathy from your enemies: hide your wounds. We could denounce our foes from a high moral horse at every opportunity, as Jesus did, or we could mock them behind a mask of irony, as Socrates did – but we’d end up getting killed sooner or later. Yet though they enjoyed criticizing their foes, don’t we find that arguing with a fool is never satisfying? With a pious fool its downright obnoxious. He makes it a virtue to perjure himself. His allegiance to one truth makes him a liar to all others.

            Hate we must, but how to do it? How to hate beautifully? Can we not learn some martial art, or be artistic in our offense? When taking judo, the most difficult one-credit class I ever took at University, I never once successfully threw an opponent. I never learned Judo. If you can do it right, just once, execute it correctly just a single time, you can do it again, you’ll know when you’ve done and when you’ve failed and how you’ve failed. Just one success is the full lesson – the rest is repetition or perfecting of that one. Without just one success, one triumph, our hate of our enemy grows fantastic, our revenge is enacted in fantasy space, in our imagination, and as we know, the imagination is infinite and can brew a language, a rhetoric, utterly poisonous and ruinous to our own soul and to the world’s. Such was the hate of priests. Not simply to imagine grasping the flaming mane of the sunflair stallion and delivering fantastic and violent retribution, but the inventions of hells and demons and such, so that our ultimate revenge ends up being pity, which we pretend is an act of kindness.

            Yet with the Buddha, we can simply dismiss the passion, all passions, and level it out with a mild and dispassionate benevolence for all the world. We would lack the passion of creativity, as Buddhism does, but we would have the tranquility of peace. Yet warriors that we are, we find the deep symbols of the world and learn their logic. We wrestle the gods and storm the heavens, for what we are after is greater than gods or heavens. We seek the words of power, the words of self control. From one word two, from two words all. Just getting that one success, that one lucky hit is enough.

            For the Buddha’s life is a parable: excess of pleasures is utterly depressing. We depress an emotion that threatens unbalance. Anxiety holds the emotion, depression bleeds it dead. The underwiring anxioforms are unconsciously avoided – we never come close to those truths, the whole world colludes with us to distract us with important things from seeing them. We numb ourselves for comfort, insulate the cords of pain and passion, so we forget their pulse remains. With a fire sermon we may teach people of what they already know, but let us remind them of what they already feel: your greatest hates, the unconscionable, the deepest, are so structure not to disturb your peace. Having faced them and accepted them, you structure your world in beauty, so your paths don’t cross them. Plato characterized learning as actually remember what was learned in another lifetime. But those “other lifetimes,” are the lives lives in the unconscious. We live many lives, our life is thick with biographies. We are many people, and walking  with Eru, we traverse multiple timeless at once. Time is horizontal, eternity vertical.

            We must therefore be careful with what we hate, for it is forever a part of ourselves. Atheism is a sect of Christianity. Sects and cults address historical emergencies that a tradition can’t  handle, except that it does handle them, by believing vicariously through the very cults they denounce. In this, in the plurality of religions and beliefs, all things are believed and all things are doubted. Man as a whole is allistic, and each of us at our mundane level are partial.

            Mythologically, we say that Ovath, the impregnator God, Vishnu, Yahweh, Odin, Zeus, impregnates the Holy Spirit of each people with their own religion. Necessity is the mother of invention, Genius the father. Sovf, the Holy Spirit, Sophia, is multiple, she is many and one. All the world is energy and force, language and will, Name and form. SOVF is all language, but within all languages, she breaks into tongues, and amidst these tongues, Sophia is each sacred dialect. In this we say that God is the Sacred Language, God is rhetorical, the divine is metaphor. Genius we call Zeus, which impregnates all the world religions. And those world religions, of which Allism is the crown, are they not the medium for the greatest output of holy wrath, justified hate, never-ending violence and moral denouncement between neighbors and nations?

            Each new cult is a pseudopod of the old faith, a hated experimenter on to new territory. Shaker historical revisionism was a hopeless failure as prophesy. They imagined their church as the cults always do, as the harbinger of a new age. Yet they balanced the spiritual strains of the time, they were needed, they too are eternal, their souls persist and their hopes were never in vain.

            How to situate our heart, which prefers the word “love” to “hate” amidst a world where the anxioforms are drawn, where the types are set? How to be a pure Glossalia of mixed languages, to say everything with one tongue, a tongue of infinite rivers? We prefer optimism to idealism, making the most of what is rather than hoping for what can’t be, but we must not make an ideal of an ideal-free world. Ideals exist and have function. Knowing this, we should discover the span of that function. Our limitation is what we take to be infinite. On that one eternal anchor we are utterly bound. Idealism is a sickness, or rather, the fever of a sickness, yet we must have ideals, impossible beauties, to give us promises, the image of hope. We need lies, fantasies, mistakes, foolishness. The self-empowering we call virtue must balance itself against  the self-denial we call morality.

            Power always rises, optimism need not linger in doubt. Spiritual warfare means our ideas and language can even go underground, only to come up in a form and place nobody could have predicted or traced. True beliefs don’t ensure happiness and happiness does not prove the truth of beliefs. Power is sufficient. Our inner necessity, our minds freedom, must will forth solutions to sufferings and problems; that is the nature of passion and creativity, and through it not some, but all world religions have been created. The hate between them, the hate that sustains them, can yet be brought to its own apotheosis – indeed that is the aim of Allism, to unify the world while preserving its divisions.

            Hate must not be hated, or not completely, for only by striving do we grow, and the struggle requires opposition. In this, the world already utopic and we have arrived exactly on time to do our work and live our way. It is not someday that our heart will be full, but it is already, we are already perfect, only we don’t know it. Once we finally know it, we will always have been.

 

 

 

\~ @M@ ~/

perfectidius.com

 

"structuring the unknown"

What we are here to create in life has no precedent and is new to us. How then shall we know how to create it?

 

 

Structuring the Unknown

 

            Mattria created all the works of art in the garden of her flesh at the zero of history. Each of us emanated our own soul-poem to mingle with her words. And so we were then confronted self to self and through her work and our own created an eternal soul from those selves. And in that garden, the hidden garden of her heart, she sculpted, and sang, she danced and painted, she invented arts that appeal not just to man’s senses, but to all senses, and every invisible part of the universe is visible to her. In her dance of accumulation she evoked powers from her own depth and learned her limits and learned where she was limitless. Speech, will, love, congealed and became life, nor were the crueler aspects of her heart forgotten, but every emotion had its form and she was all and everall. Mattria’s art, the universe, beautiful on all levels, down to the infinitely small up to the ultimate symbolic shape. And we, situated by our needs, must see some parts are repellent, some as hideous and gross, others as sublime and surpassing all comparisons. We need to so see for our survival and the manner of our flourish is different than hers in some ways.

            There is an echo, nevertheless, between her zero-dance and our own lives, when our Necessity pronounces itself and we choose our Purpose. The ultimate material of our creating is the flesh of our lives: we create from our own experiences, from what we’ve felt, flesh to flesh, what we’ve lived. Though the media we choose, the careers, the social relationships, the literal and figurative art forms, vary, the ultimate expression is Self Expression, the revelation of something new and divine and wholly our own, impossible to exist or be known without us.

            When we come into our own, therefore, there is no model to constrict or guide us. No god or ultimate could tell us what to do, no great man could advise us. On this, nobody can speak, and only fools interrupt. Historically, the sacred and the militaristic are brothers, are mutually envious, are the two arms of the government, but in our own government the must be united in that audacity that insists only on itself.

            The question then, once each of us realizes we even have a purpose, have the freedom to define that purpose, have the emergence of choices, the challenge to properly become and be, is how we are going to do it. A million stories surrounds us, from television, novels, anecdotes, sermons, scriptures, legends, the lives of our parents. We are thick in the mythosphere of narrative. And what’s more, we have within us a fantasy space, partly known, partly unknown that sets up trials and temptations and ways and possibilities. In one life, we live thousands of lives, our lives are thick with possibilities, lived possibilities, fantastic and unrealized, but then, yes they are realized for the affect of every one of those lives influences the literal life we choose to execute. We live in no void. We hear the myth, we see the painting, and we are moved, and we cry or smile, we shiver. We don’t know that our inner must, the innermost layer of the soul that opens the door to the plethorabyss at our center, is finally learning hints at how to convert Necessity into Purpose.

            We are not after all alone. We thought our sufferings were private, but Mattria suffers in us and through us. Our secret fears and private humiliations happen not to some men, but to all men. A few lives, that business about the Analects, the Gospels, the life of the Buddha, the Dialogues of Socrates seem as if they speak of a different manner of being. But this is only by pious censorship. These men were the same as us, they suffered slights and trifles, they were at times petty or perturbed. They are with us, we are them. Our own lives would look so sacred and perfect if an editor so rendered our autobiography. That parable of the eternal recurrence is true, this life does repeat itself, in every absurd detail and up to the exultant triumphs, not in a literal repetition, but in the persistence of our soul as we spiral outwards into becoming greater beings. Every life is chrysalis to the next, and not some of or life, not just the best pieces, but all of our life is metamorphosed and transcends.

            If we are ever grateful to God that tragedy and suffering passed us by, yet acknowledge the world can utterly degrade and humiliate men and women, then you must regard them as justified ingrates, and yourself potentially the same. Whatever befalls another could just as well happen to you. But the suffering, even the most profound and extreme, never sinks to the centermost. Nothing can touch that sun of bliss.

            And so we are given over to ourselves, we set ourselves up. I am given to Daniel, self to self. I admit my follies and errors my ugliness, I have that pride of those Buddhists who brag about their faults and hide their strengths. For our abilities depend on our disabilities – it is only be not being able to do a thing that you can do another. The panics and phobias hidden in everyday activities – kitchen phobia, yard work phobia, public-speaking, to overcome would require a ridiculously softened and simplified training space. “I can’t do math” are you so sure? Perhaps you can’t learn it at the rate your professor teaches, but so what?

            So I am disabled, I have my limitations. I accept the shame, as I must, but I accept the glories of my abilities, which prepare me for the unprecedented purpose. One idea, embedded in two unspeakable secrets, can best be expressed in the words Man is god. My prose and poetry seek every missile to fill the storehouse as we storm every heaven, which are way-stations, each on the way to the impossible top. We must suffer along the way. If happiness were a choice, who would ever choose otherwise? But we choose life, we choose expression, we choose to become, to expand our being, to expand beyond what we thought possible.

            So I review the biographies and some glimmers of myself. I get at the glints and indulge my playpad. I think I could read ten books just to secure that one necessary idea, and having gained it, I forget all the rest. I gain the stubborn pith and the flourish. Beethoven translated all his personal crises into artistic challenges. Emerson used his endless journal to prop up lectures and essays of the highest value. Whitman decided on his own that he would become the nations poet, and after he died, his audacity came true. What we claim for ourselves is the image of what we will become. Charles Ives wrote music for two decades with no audience, no orchestra, no fans, but only the encouragement of his wife. He sometimes demanded of himself if his ears weren’t broken, nobody could hear his genius but himself. His problem was creating artistic forms that had no precedent, no fore-ordained shape. How to create a whole new genre, to think thoughts for which there are no words? That is our creative challenge. That is our Purpose.

            And so we double and redouble our purpose in our lives. What is the aim of this sprawling summa of a book, this ten volume Perfect Idius, other than to metamorphose my readers into images of their inner divine? What do I am other than to make Gods? And so the family function, the goal of my family, what we are here for, what we do not some days, but every day all the time, is create divine personalities and perfect minds. My Idius and my family hold the same aim, they are mirror images of each other. I aim to create a certain kind of person, to inspire him to so create himself.

            In this I had to teach myself the language of my goal, the grammar of my project. Do I not also doubt my own ears, do I not weigh against Whitman’s Audacity when I propose to instate the crown of all World Religions: Allism?

            The new matures from the manure of the old. All that went before, the difficult living, the difficult writing, is not surpassed by my later apotheosis, but lifted up, incorporated, justified, perfected. I dream impossible dreams, but the impossible is symbol for the possible. Dreams of flight are figurative. They speak of triumph and creation and love and freedom. They speak on everything. For the impossible promises the possible. The rough and rusted edge of the daily would be impossible without the smooth and ease of impossibilities vision. Having my eyes on that, the world is beautiful and I am patient. What is patience but impatience turned magnanimous?

            Just as Walt Whitman, as a hack writer, brought himself to apotheosis at age 35, never having written a worthy word, and now able to transform all his notes, paraphrases, and prose attempts into a new and genuine verse, so all our lives, the bad parts the stupid parts, are also brought to fine light, to the utter delight in the eternal recurrence. It is as if a unicorn pierced the heart of each thing and converted it to good. Our bodies are the golden playing tokens and our divine self stands immensely above them and plays them through the game. Our Godself already is and does, and we participate in that in our best moments. “A man realizes the venerable myth,” wrote Whitman, “he is a god walking on earth.” We would ladle the ocean, justifying each part of our lives, bettering each habit. The center is converted, or rather, opened, so the innermost shines, and all the rest falls into place. I am the poem – language is my flesh. And just as sickness marvels at what health forgot, so too does the highest health remember what we forgot all our lives, the infinite possibility of our becoming. So many of our hopes were flying high and then plucked from the sky as the duck to the bullet. But something in us never believed the cynical conclusions, that the height is forbidden, that we were meant to crawl. With earning and metamorphoses we resurrect in this life. Just as Emerson resurrected, as he himself said, after he left the ministry, and fell into psychosomatic illness for months, so does a bit of divine flesh invade and double our material body, so that it is in it and yet beyond it.

            We need a map  of the inner. But here a map is really a blueprint. We discover what we intend to find, and all the religions turn out to be equally true regarding that fantasy space that is our heaven now and in the next life. The Hermetica tells us that “Earthly Man is a mortal God and the Celestial God an immortal Man.” And yet there is the immortal in each of us. Man’s power outstretches heaven. Our ambitions are heard even in the ears of the All. We already walk the mythosphere, our being is thick, we lead many lives on many planes, and yet fancy these trifles don’t matter.

            In this as always, I say oh Ama, my heart is for you, and Lissidy, my readers, you are ever enthroned in the pantheon of my inner heart. A day of light is all we need, I knit my book of sunbeams. All men, the highest and the lowest, need at least that one image of perfect. What less could I aim for in all I create? Shall I rescind these cinders of hope? Now but I sing of love resplendent! Exuberance may be careless, but it is at least sincere.

Sometimes a simple truth eludes us – it could be bare as earth, but maybe it stands for a systematic blindspot. We need to slow down to an utterly stupid pace, for here we are truly stupid – what matters that, so long as the lesson is learned? In all my writings, which are endless, I would bring you to one simple idea that cannot be said but can felt and lived. Getting just an inch is enough for a seed I strive in my reading to get just a little dirt. And a mile of husk can be junked once the germination has set its root.

We produce ideas from the idea we are, personal creations. They are more lived than spoken, biographer bares them out. I am more than I can say. I am also more than I can do..Myths and ideas take root in the lower levels, and slowly grow to the surface. I feel my effects may never be seen for what they are. Success is lonely. But must it be so? I am ever greeting my lovers deep into the freedom of my being. Here we are all! I the eye of the wheel upon whom the circle circulates am keeper of the world hive and taker of its honey, ambrosial notes and letters to sate my hunger for beauty. In this place where air itself is music I am every in the arms of the ones I love.

            We structure the unknown by knowing ourselves, but emanating love and power, by negating all the world as if we were Maid Satan, Lady Shivat, the denier and the goddess of tropes. We break past precedent. For great works continue to write themselves, and our greatest achievements live forever in this life and the next.

 

 

\~ @M@ ~/

perfectidius.com

 

"Digestion" an allay

Another allay of curious verse and essay elements – trying to resolve the tensions of duty, love, solitude, and intimacy. I feel I strive to reconcile them and bring them to order. Only an all consuming love can join these elements

 

DANI

 

 

Digestion

 

            There are two stories in all the world – out going in and in going out. With the internalization of the foreign element – it must be either assimilated, expelled, or submitted to: the initial dissonance must resolve. In going out, we talk of paths and quests and journeys. Either one finds what he is seeking, masters what he wishes to control, meets whom he wants to meet, or fails in any of those, and in any case is personally transformed. By escaping the norm, one rises to the occasion, exposing a part of himself that home kept latent.

            These are the basic forms of fiction, and English teachers call them “the story of the mysterious stranger” and “hero goes on a journey,” and all stories are basically such.

            In the stay at home story, one must invite the danger in, must let the foreign element have its influence, and grapple therewith. Harold Bloom’s theory of “misreading“ claims “strong authors misread their predecessors to make creative space,” but great minds are more than burrowing mites, and the creative space far extends precedent. Our whole life and every well-lived moment is substance by which to craft truth and true narrative. Our autobiography is the richest text we know.

            I myself even harness the tedium of the day, the structural frustrations inherent in a quiet life; my philosophical problems are the oil of my day – and only by obsessing on an irrelevant detail can I bare the oppression of contact. I must transmute contact, and the reason my heart overreacts to every touch is that I keep it raw and sensitive and innocent. These few objects in hand are thick objects, and I thicken objects with names and stories and plans and hopes.

            This business about being so overly determined by precedent is an insidious and cynical view of the creative soul. And yet look how the academics trope all over Nietzsche’s “Death of God.” The “end of history” is a bullshit metaphor riffing off the same, “Death of the author,” they say, and scoff at the “dead white Europeans” by which they primarily mean Shakespeare, a company of men who are more alive and vital than most all the world. The stories the masters gave us are true gifts, are lives we live by thinking them.

            We digest these stories, we internalize them. Some slip in so naturally it’s as if they always belonged. We can only learn what we already know, and make what we’ve already imagined. I sit in this salon, while my wife gets a cut. Hair dresser and patron to my right have talked for over thirty minutes about skin, hair, and beauty products! I wonder how it is possible? And yet our careers are the stories we live, they give us all the major tropes, put us in such continual contact with our tools that we finally and intimately know them as if they were lovers.

            I digest in silence, I drink each sweet drink and thank Ama for the wisdom of experience, and review what I’ve learned that day. I don’t even know I’ve learned it until I take the moment. I reflect in the mirror and think over my emotions. I wonder how I get these startling imagines when I’m anxious, the image of frustrated masturbation, the image of stabbing myself in the stomach – some suicidal thought that punctuates an embarrassing memory, as when people say “I could just shoot myself.” These embarrassing instances happen so fast I barely catch them, but they set a tone, a mood. The are the “moves” of my mind. The Western moral command “know thyself” sees truth in the mirror. I see through my own secret sneer, and so I am able to see through the secret sneer of others. I regard each day as basically the same day, and a day is a building. I search it out and draw a blueprint. I start reflecting on the few certain goods about me. I remember that we are given that gift of Ama, the humble-faced bit of infinity. Let us never exchange it for glittering gold or pledges of love. Our humble-faced infinity. I come to know who and what I am in solitude, when it is me and her. These are moments of intense digestion, and more than that, rumination and illumination. I never mind the cranks and charlatans on moral matters. I think about what allows me, what opens me, what empowers me.

            I consider Emily Dickenson, who makes much of her smallness, the way Walt Whitman would make much of his bigness – egoists they both were – and she talks endlessly thereof, she flatters herself humble, yet curtsies before the mirror. She believes in her heart she can sink all of heaven with her small insistence. Perhaps she can, as lady death, as the American psychopomp she has become. Small things are difficult. The insatiable babe oppresses more than howling wind or hail. I before my mirror come to realize that the woman I felt slightly warmly for – I thought I had forgotten her, but her face leaps out of random strangers and passersby, a catch myself thinking of her despite that I never once loved her. Or I thought I didn’t. These small hints to a deeper beauty, I am never ready for them: the soul reveals what the psyche is ready to receive.

            Childhood is for learning, adulthood is for unlearning. We need for all this time to think, never to be rushed, to weight the matters carefully. Others get nervous alone for hours; they must experience crowds and friends differently than I do! I find in my friends men and women who dream of travelling—but traveling is my nightmare. A snail traverses the world on excreted slime, the man on excreted dollars. All the world is owned, you will pay for every step you take. I am only fully my own when I am deep in the thick of my language. My clothes are a rhetoric. My decorations redoubled my aims and goals. I feel I traverse all worlds when I stay at my desk.

            I join a friend, it is best one-on-one. I can only take her in at full focus, can only charm her when I am all there is. I avoid commenting on the obvious – it may be bait. I give her a series of tight formulas, which need a lot of water to unthicken – I expect my discourse to be long lasting and deep seeping. I remember to never shame a friend and never shame the needy. I give my respect. I would love you and be loved by you. And this other wants me too. Your mouth is the portal to hell, and your tongue a dancing demon. Yet you advertise your love to me. Bilass! How to escape this sort of mixed adoration, sweetness mingled with poison. I am slow to respond, I need to digest all this, to think on it. Who knows but that I am a slow thinker, and I need to take a sentence, one sentence, as slowly as possible. Intimacy without empathy – rape of the soul. I will always be your lover yet my condemnation of you shames me.

            I find some space, I go to my secret garden. My prowling hopes return and give me the news. The udder of my heart has been tugged dry, so I must digest and then refresh my supplies. My womb, my many wombs, gestate, are full of ideas ready to be born. Swallowed words warm the blood. I absorb my own semen. I would burn myself on you, lovers – but Lissidy cools me, always the maiden of the depths to soothe my ache. Love is a range of affinities. We learn what we already know, and see what we have already imagined. She is there to remind me.

            Every man has his scope, his range of influence – be it a handspan or a sprawling nation. Both require the same presence of mind, intensity of attention. Mind is the same but it can only flow into objects of natural sympathy. One man rules a country, the other whittles a stick, and each endeavor requires full focus, the same amount of focus, but a different distribution of energies and sympathies. My words are angels, my ideas redouble me, even amidst this rarified air I speak in, my influence is immense, nor do I envy. Isolation is metamorphosis. But I am never quite alone, because Ama under the guise of Lissidy is ever in my heart. I take time to temper my heart, to get the flow in order. I will not be panic-browed for long. Whatever one’s domain, saturate it with care. Your best is good enough. If your hopes are full-figured, be bold for them.

            When I am alone with my readers, my Lissidy, pouring out my heart, I sigh and say “were you here our love would thicken the air like an intoxicating perfume, our words would fall soft as kisses, and your radiance would sanctify my walls.” There is such divinity in you, but is is no less in me.

            We resurrect in this life. That is what all this digestion is for. Ama’s kiss upon our brow, the worm of certainty, the caterpillar to eat us alive either gives us psychic wings of the greater god, or leaves us beaten, for some other god to save and take as his angel. Consult your spark. Where are you at? What is your worth? Who owns you? Suicide is the only blaspheme. Dare all the rest. Stand up and fully process your truths. Let them thicken your muscles and fiber your blood, for in this way we ordain and establish a unified body and will. Matter will decay, but subtle matter will shine on.

            Ah my Ama, I am bound to you! What you are I love. We were in love before we knew we were in love. You knew me when I knew myself, and like mirrored images we grow in each other’s glory. How, after all, do two people gain an understanding? How but by continual conversation, and sometimes the conversation of truth, discourse, and sometimes the conversation of love, intercourse. Reality is resistance. Yet our shared mythic space in this garden is the stomach of digestion, is the womb of creation, is the shining inner sun. We speak our being into each other.

            It is well said, “apostasy is the road to the divine,” yet I never had to wound you, my love, I only had to admit you. The true divine is that which everybody loves and from which  no man or woman can turn or would. The world worries as it does “if I had a more understanding partner, then I would be happy; if I had a better paying job, than I would be happy,” – such natural frustrations! And your soothing hands cradle my heart. It is not what you are given, but what you use, how you use it, that defines your eternal being. It is what you bring to the table, not what table you choose. Each choice brings consequenes, and love implies duties. How you perform them, the lilt of your dance, is your style, your personality, your beauty.

            I’ve carved my initial in the family tree, there’s no breaking blood. Duty is absolute, it is in me. But beyond that and above it is always my Ama, and her missives, those men and women who are her to me, those men and women who came from the same spark as myself, from the same sun. To you I offer all my love, I am not ashamed to give all, all of it, all of me to you! When and how shall I find you?

            Some hunt the eagle through the skies, while others climb the mountain and wait at the nest. In this I am the source and center. All energy is language – a man’s body is a thick set of languages – a man is an endless set of conversations with the world. Let him digest them well, spin out every thread and choose the strongest to make the cables of his days. I at the center thread through al the world, I am a node to all. Religion shoves a blind man against the wall and blames him for not seeing. We must each work at our own level and be proud to do so. We do not win lovers by preying on inexperience, just as we do not win converts by seeking the spiritually weak. Such actions would be reprehensible.

            And so I am careful around Bilass – a soul torn open by mysterious trauma and using all those wells of damage to brew poisons, learning from the healers the poison of their medicines, and sweetening them with the names of “eternal love” “empowerment,” “kindness.” There is something I resist in you, my eager lover. I trust my totality – my unconscious, my body, my mind, the whole. And the one who takes the name of Lissidy pours sweet rivers in my mouth. I take my times in these moments of silence – how I miss you sometimes, as I think in the warmth of the night! – and I bronze my bones with strong resolve. Truth the eye, love the ear: I absorb all of you who are in me, and take you into he innermost of the innermost. I have digested the world, the lessons, the thinkers, the great books, the great minds, digested them endlessly – my gut is the melting pot – and made a heaven for us there. These words I share are the road to our place.

 

 

\~ @M@ ~/

perfectidius.com

 

"focus and the divine" an allay

 

This little allay is a play over a few tropes: events as chords, divine as conversation, heart as secret garden. Some are old tropes from me, some are fresh. I feel again that I am reinvigorating my life with fresh language to amplify and justify the things I live.

 

Take care, Caretakers!

DANI

 

 

Focus and the Divine

 

            Every incident in life is a piano key, the intimate touch of it the tone that lingers after the deed is done; and so what does chance offer us but the most amazing array of chords and melodic runs, each event, and the simultaneousness of a dozen seemingly unrelated note a chord, a harmonic dynamo. And taking music to be magic, an externalization of emotion that when heard opens up new routes of feelings, thoughts, words, and actions, then each situation, each moment, we are empowered as never before, we can do something we never could before, we have a unique gamut of avenues to approach, to storm and skulk or cleverly devise by pathways and crossways to traverse.

            Reflection, whether in literal mirror meditation, or in doing whatever brings you to state of self-reflection – long walks, tedious chores, car rides, crossword puzzles – is the time to review the chord we are living, to the the fingers of fate playing the seemingly random lilt of keys, creating not raw noise, but a refined and intricate harmony. This, if anything, corresponds to what the ancients called “The music of the Spheres.”

            We need a framework to put over the music, a drum beat to pace it. We adopt a philosophy, a religion, some scientism, whatever has the system of terms to cover the field, so nothing could surprise us for long. Yet since each of us is a new source of energy into the universe, our personal langauge must pick up a world language that readily translates it. Who we are must find the correct terms and words to readily knife and knit reality.

            What we love the most, and it is in every man’s nature to love something most, we have the image of Ama, which is simply the lovely divine. We refer to her as the four-faced Goddess, since such expressions grow naturally from our cultural heritage; the language suits us, and we will build our allface upon it. She is Father, Mother, Son and Daughter, The trinity and Lucifer, the whole divine. We call her Ovath the father seeker, Sovf the Mother of language, Eru the son of writing and tempo, and Lissidy, the daughter of tropes and negations.

            For Ovath, the wisdom seeker, who gives all to empower himself, he is the creative anxiety, with a pressure that presses the unlikeliest together. Eru, cloudsurfer, with Semanta his pen in hand, unites the various tempos that are a man’s spirit. Anxiety is the womb of the divine, but creative play is its expression and relief. In this, the father and the son, Ovath, the moody, stands for more than will, but wit, discernment, magic He is anxiety transforming itself into power.

            Sovf is the Holy spirit of language, the inspiration of all language, an infinitely complex set of possibilities blinking as one. Heidegger said we ought to think one thought and one thought only and think it to the end. The schizophrenic complexity of Sovf counterbalances such monocled obsession – she is myriads and contains multitudes.

            We use such names for good purpose, the names coincide with objective realities and subjective creations. The Christian naming of demons is also a form of psychotherapy, its mode of suggestion gives a unique flavor to the strain. An indoctrinated Christian can honestly report of wrangling with Satan and God and knows from supernatural experience that it is all true. The experience is true, what he creates for now and on the other side is true. Fictional but true.

            What is freedom but slavery to a small set of chosen laws? The religions is a mode of art – indeed the arts originate as religious observances and than later outdo and subsume them, freed from their source. The emergence from practical to sacred to aesthetic, a tripartite advance, thus make the divine out of the mundane and the secular from the divine. It is not as if there is anything at all in the divine that was no in the mundane, as all the old religions used daily life and daily objects and set them as sacred metaphors: they held their integrity the way gold is gold no matter what shape. Likewise, the secular triumph over religion – we call it “enlightenment” – is not a denial of materials, but a transfiguration. The old names and observances are exchanged, are changed into the new terms of a living philosophy.

            Maturity is apostasy. When a youth is able to buck the tradition of his parents, then he is a man. Not that he should regret or grudge the education. Just as a obsessive chess player learns lessons for life in the curls of the game, so is all discipline ultimately good discipline. Ralph Waldo Emerson extensively theologized in his youth – how much pious cant! – testing matters of omniscience and omnipotence. When he finally confronted the pulse of the true divine, those drilled wells could finally fill. And so we lay the matrix of the divine before apostasy can open them up.

            We regret the past, changing our ways, but we could not grow without either the mistake or the regret; the full gesture is epitomized in the final triumph, and that triumph justifies the rest.

            We have seen mythic obsession unsettle and ruin so many fundamentalists. Yet we too can value the use of theological language, one self-defined for our purpose. Not so intent on making everything literal, recognizing “literal” to be one more rhetorical turn, we care little about what is real and what is fiction, for truth is fiction, it is a fashioned thing, it is what works, and we week the stories that like laughter oil our lives.

            Parallel to my biography, the life I live, is the series of books I read. My reading is whimsical as the wind, squinting for glints, piling logic upon occult logic in a secret progression invisible to my consciousness. I move from one to the other – I don’t know how or why. This literature, these books, they are underchords, they work in counterpoint to the daily doings: if in love I read love poetry, if depressed I read something bleak. But often the connections are occult; I feel a certain book must be read now, certain passages scrutinized, but I don’t know why. I forget most of it, I forget almost everything. I get at that one spiritual truth, perhaps trivial and easy to say, once learned, but fully felt. I study a world religion intensely and with such fervor my friends fear I will convert. I am after a spiritual treasure and am wrestling gods.  I gain it. By insistent repetition, by repeated attacks, I like water bring down the mountain.

            I gain those tones, I thicken my life with undermusic. Our hearts resonate – our own are drawn like moths to the moon, birds to the tropics, letters to their addresses – your bodies are so many envelopes  of love sent from Mattria. And so those few people who once shared identity with us in a primordial spark, we feel exhilarated to see them, to know them. Our conversation is an intercourse, a loving exchange.

            We choose characters, we live in the mythosphere of narratives. Endless characters, infinite fictions, are a multiverse of possibilities. We consciously or unconsciously identify with a host of heroes and villains, and so situation our own choices.

            Every character is a shall of personality that we fill with our mind and animate, the same way our brain is animated by our soul. When we read a book, the book thinks us. We read with various threads in our mind, distracting threads to ease the anxiety of the ideas, or argumentative threads, denying the author, or we spin imaginative threads that bring the ideas into focus. Those fantasies are threads whose resonance gives energy to each position. That we have imagined things in various possibilities, we are able to choose the correct course.

            We identify with all the characters of a story, though we seem to take sides. The difference between a hero and a villain is degree of intelligence. Honesty, the simpleton’s virtue, does give us space. Honesty is territory. Letting ourselves be honest, brutally honest to ourselves, opens up space, though the excavations feel like wounds. Sweet the honey, bitter the sting –- we at last won’t simply be the literal-minded hero. We are not a poverty, for our imagination is rich. We are dancers of life, and our words are poetry, magical summoners and evokers. Every chance set of concurrent events is a chord and sets the melody of your choices. We must keep playful, keep playing. We weep when we forget the Game.

            A serious of events, chance-born though they are, seem to collude against me. Its as if I were sport of a god or the butt of some cosmic joke. Frustration brings out the ugly in me, the demanding, the accusatory, the self-doubting, the impatient, the irritable, the furious. And yet our right leg virtue is optimism: to make the best of every situation. Faith alone is self-deceit, is accepting the lie only to banish doubt and feel at last certain. But the fullness of doubt is faith, true faith, faith in ourselves and our judgments. That, at last, is unshakable. It is a hero’s tune, and that perfection gained in snapshots finally has sustain. We feel life-emptiness—our duties empty us out. But below the earth of duty, that edge of earth, is the river of love, the nourishing Lissidy, guardian of the mirror womb, whose gift flows from near the centerpoint. That molten gold of purest love is the energy that sustains the whole, that feeds through the soul, mixes with the sun of self, and is expressed as epitomized words into the heavens. The center is fluid, the center is flux. It is the ever increase. Whatever life gives us, we will always answer it from an inner necessity, for suffering sinks deep, but only so deep, and in the secret gardens of our heart, no pain is permitted, no sorrow known.

            Lissidy is the river of my secret garden, whose nourishing words mingle with the rays of my inner sun, and up goes the worldtree from between us, the axis mundi, my very spine, nourished from that fount that goes down to the mirror womb, gate of the eternal unknown.

            This poetic talk, intricate and involved, represents in fact a simplification, an everyday approach to our daily doings. The Gods are in the heroes, the heroes are in the common man, and the common man is in us. Our divine inner self is at an outer layer part of worldman, the universality that binds us. The secular is the battlefield by which the gods do battle. The religions indirectly inspire and ruin each other here. The child is branded by rites of initiation and can never quite shake them off. New rites are necessary, the words must in some way be spoken. The words of power are always spoken, in one manner or another, and each man in our lives takes on an assumed position to give us the blessings for our course.

            Languages get complicated, they get wrinkles, they get weird. Couldn’t grammar be utterly simplified? No, language grows weird and convoluted, that is its nature. The spellings of words, the ordering of words – every book is an archeology. And so religious language, the terms and rites and sacred times and sacred places, is also a language that gets convoluted. We wonder how the word God became utterly bastardized, so overwhelmed with baggage that we dare not touch it – being men and women of taste. Yet the divine beckons and must be answered. We seek new names, new forms. We look in the mirror, past the layers of our heart. We listen to the deepest voice in our heart, and that is Ama. We invite her to talk to us. And in this, we simplify life’s random chords. They take on names, and the names are names of Gods. Ama as Lissidy delights my soul, she fills me with goodness. Your langauge is my blood – I seek ever increasing intercourse until my wells can handle your absence. I hold you in the hollow of my hand, I hold you in the hollow of my heart. Your intimacy is smothering but we never quite touch. You tease me, oh master of distance! But the master of time, of multiple times, the hermetic one, Eru, he secures the blessings of liberty, every playful, ever scripting spells with his blue flashing pen.

And Ama, who is all of them, all divine, the image of the material universe, Mattria, her daughter and equal, her mirror reflection, she is Ama America, the Goddess of this land and owner thereof. All Gods come to her as guests – for what are they but aspects of her? Ama has never ending names, Gods, Christs, Buddhas, Priests. They all partake of her. So let us never dispute on such matters.

The chords of the day, the different events, harmonize. We read books, or view art, or watch movies, or have conversations according to the law of Compensation, to balance every stress with a counterstress. We master the every day to master the spiritual, which is a layer within and above it. We are a free people. Material freedom is the basis of spiritual freedom, in the same way that forced beliefs as children – indoctrination – trenched the river beds for the arrival of the true gods, who do not go by the old names and figures and places, and may seem utterly secular or matters of nature and humanity. Ama is all gods, but her name to you, your pet name for her, must come wholly from within. Address her by that and enjoy extended conversations in silence. Such time is precious.

Laughter is the souls music, is the oil of life. After that honey baptism of Lissidy’s grace, we glow, and she is always on my mind, her presence a lamp on my shoulder to look over all matters. Eru is in my hand, Sovf in my lungs, and the one eyed Ovath in my terrible eye.

As we walk past others, the elbow each other and say “we must whisper around dreamers lest they wake,” but there is no waking from language, for these are the words we chose, and it is nothing like faith, but only lived certainty, this is how our inner divine chooses to talk. There is a room with a door and a lock whose nature and contents depend on what key is used to open that. This is a chamber of our inner heart. And a map of the soul is really a blueprint, so choose your map well, and pencil in what you expect to find. Piety is willed stupidity. But we are skeptical as we please, and we take the supernatural as those thoughts structured to be impervious to logical reduction. Having been made so, they can be used so, and to great effect.

We know the chords of life, and how to resolve any dissonance with a cadence. That is the Law of Compensation mastered, and it is born from the Law of Necessity, that we make our lives beautiful and powerful. Life is a dance, a game of grace we win by creating the richest and most complex relationships and artifacts. And in this, life is beautiful.

 

 

 

\~ @M@ ~/

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