"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@ ~/

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