Sunday, July 28, 2013

Ovath and Asuvius

I write myths describing the nature of Ama, the divine -- stories, like all myths, meant to simplify and articulate a complex set of thoughts. The characters of my myths are Ovath, the Father, Sophia, the Mother, Eru the Son, and Lissidy the daughter, and they make up the aspects of the "four-faced Goddess" Ama -- who really stands for all the divine, all divine figures of every myth, but for my particular stories specifically regards these characters. This telling regards Ovath's struggle against Asuvius, the Howler.

 

 

Ovath and Asuvius

                Ovath, all-father, averse to dawn, and a friend of evening times, once was called to fight an idea of his daughter Lissidy who had sprung forth from her void. The wraith was named Asuvius, the screecher, the howler, and could not be approached, nor in her appetite be penetrated, but was pure noise and anguish and appetite. Driven as the old god was into despair over the howler’s rage, and unable to penetrate it with his spear of penetration – indeed, not having a hold of himself to even approach – he could find no language in all his commands to shake the howler to her core, no voice, of all the languages his wife Sophia had taught him – for all languages are hers – till he sought himself a private place, and in the inner of his thoughts contemplated his task. He came to feel an inner noise, a bit of disorder, in his gut, and could not figure out how the malady had come so close to home. And so, with the spear, Slin, which nothing can resist in its seamless intent, he penetrated his own gut, and touched that unknown place, and in his penetration came to the brink of death, and this bit his being at the moment of dawn, when her rosy fingers first fly evenly over the land, and there he found, in the deathlessness of his being, the secret words, the words of silence, the word of impenetrable silence, and eternal patience. He swooned and lost life, but returned wiser and the holder of a secret word.

                Once recovered, he sought Asuvius, nude, with nothing that could resonate to her, just his whole purified form, clothed in robes of light. In the darkness where Asuvius hid, he heard her by her appetite, and by the pang in his gut, which had become a new intuition, was guided through many a winding and mazy way, into her lair, into the belly, the eternal abyss of Asuvius – which was Lissidy’s doing. There, once devoured and in the center of the Wolf, fully consumed and undone, he spoke the word of impenetrable silence and eternal patience. With that, Asuvius sighed with relief and purred into absolution, and was undone in her clamor, brought to smooth even tones of an echoic resolve.

 

 

\ ~@M@~ /

perfectidius.com

 

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

"Private" a poem

Private

 

There's something in you that wants

To scar the face of beauty

To mar the soul of the ones that shine.

How could I in the inner of my garden

Permit such rueful intelligence

And critical superiority

Amidst the subtle things

Which gossamer the winds

Of this hidden place?

 

Your invidious superiority

And supernumerary ordinances

Blaspheme this place of the graceful unnamed

Your appraisals by numbers

And dispositions witty

The unsayable pleasures of hidden founts

Revolt against, and like a blighted flower

Shrivel at your sneer.

Why submit my subtle and savage precocious ones

To your patronizing blindness?

Your tolerance of my strangeness?

Your patience with what should

Shiver you to your core?

I sang a song of a broken heart

Your heart remained unbroken

I sang a praise of a soul full blown

You laughed at such pretention.

Better to remain the eternal unknown

Solitary and shining in the inner bright of my night.

 

 

Saturday, July 20, 2013

brief note about patience

                Don’t exasperate the willing. Don’t send a true lover into further and further proofs of her devotion. We who are so simple and trusting must tolerate much in those who forebear us. We must cheek their complaints. If we are instead so singular and austere, and demand the world of those who come to us in love, we must be as the eagle who flies high, but has superior eyes. We must know the situation, and take nothing on authority, and hearsay. We hush fools with a growl, have no patience whatsoever for nonsense. We must hold to our motive, and not let the conformity of love dissuade us. Impatience is a virtue for the proud, for the lonely, for the pure. For the guilty, the ensconced, for the situated, for the family, we should learn well from the allegory of Pandora – that boredom leads to every vice. Stupidity is hard to tempt.

                Isn’t patience a reaction to impatience, after all? That we feel we are patient when we are most tempted to be impatient, to be angry? Forbearance is feeling intense anger and holding back. A stupid man may be patient as water; lacking an imagination, an eager curiosity, a need for stimulation, he never glances out the window. He is like a man who never who enjoys a good drink, and so condemns drunkards for being the most miserable of fools. There is something especially evil in those who are not tempted as we are tempted, as if they were perverse on purpose, as if the crimes were obviously foul and only a demon would commit them.

                Just as a brazen confession can be used to hide a deeper crime, and a perpetual frankness can hide the most mazy of minds, so is a perpetual gesture towards one’s patience in fact a sign of intense impatience. Only the impatient remind us how patiently they must take us. The truly patient don’t really mind our nonsense at all, have a capacity to deal with us in all our intolerable individuality no matter what we do. This isn’t the patience of a saint, who is virtuous by bleeding, but the patience of a god, who is clever enough to make use of every situation, and has a use for everything, who has no need for patience because he is naturally so curious and creative. Every true God has something of the trickster in him. Only the impatient impress upon us how patiently they take us. A higher mind, the divine, is forever playful and enjoys us in all our nonsense.

 

 

\ ~@M@~ /

perfectidius.com

 

Friday, July 12, 2013

"Love is Guilt" an essay

This is a later section to an ongoing essay I am writing about guilt. Not only guilt, my essay on love also has gained endless additions. This section explores the relationship between guilt and love, and then stacks it against pride, as before, to see how love compares in the new dynamic.

 

"Love is Guilt"

Guilt (section 22)

 

                Guilt is an ownership, a bond. Love becomes the basis of guilt, because reciprocation is the justice of love. If a man loves a woman and she not return it, his love can become hate -- she hurt him, hurt his heart. Certainly, if she were unkind in her dismissal she would be declaimed heartless. To hurt an exposed heart is cruel, though the indecency of that exposure is imposed upon us.

                In this, guilt is what it feels like to be loved for those who suffer for our happiness: those who love you own you, and guilt is the sense of owing something. Love is intimacy is pleasure, but love as sought intimacy is desire, a pleasurable pain. We own a thing by loving it. Praying for your enemy is to achieve a sense of moral superiority over him, as if you and God together pitied him and offered a sense of patronizing mercy, “forgive them for they know not what they do.” Since one owns what he loves – to own is to use, and what better use for anything than to find pleasure in it? – love is a presumption, an imposed intimacy, a rape for the person who wishes no such intimacy And since we are basically individuals, the right to privacy is absolute, the most important right after life. We need feel no guilt that we refuse love. But if we take pleasure in it, even involuntarily, we have taken part in it, and are implicated, just as if we laughed at a racist joke.

                For of course there is an affirmation in being love, even by people you dismiss, and the guilt in it is just the shadow of the pleasure of being loved. Inveterate flirts brag about the men they have to chase away with a stick. “Heartbreaker” is such a double-edged compliment. Being loved feeds vanity, or a sense of secondary pride. But to take pleasure in the frustration of another is cruelty, is power. Hence being loved is perilous, one may soon be blamed.

                Meanwhile, the loving relationship once established is felt as an exchange of kindness and guilt. The newlyweds don’t talk of guilt as guilt because it is fluid and quickly reciprocates into making the other feel happy. Since it doesn’t get that accent, we forget it is part of all love. Every act of kindness implies reciprocation. One owes at least gratitude – sometimes no small payment! – for the be an ingrate to one so kind to you is reprehensible. A parent who gave you life, raised you, fed you, tended you in sickness, and so forth, sees this an an ownership, perhaps with a right to advise or influence your adult life.

                Since gift is guilt, we gain ownership through the logic of gifts and kindness. The idea of a gift with no strings attached offends justice. What is gift but a string? Were there any “free gift” something like Karma, or an omniscient God, would have to be assumed to reward such behavior. The sense of moral superiority in one’s own eyes would perhaps be payment enough – that man bought himself a memory. But the highest gift a man can give is to be openly happy. Others will take his example and “pay him” by being likewise happy. Greatness beheld empowers. The praise all give to great men may come from the guilt of being a benefactor, but the joy of praising greatness, the need to praise greatness, delights the soul. The greatest benefactors of man do not sacrifice, or feel it is so, but give from the joy of being themselves, from creative expression.

                Guilt and love are consonant, then, guilt is the feeling of love received -- until it can be reciprocated. Lacking that, who can endure kindness? Thus, one form of valid reciprocation is hostility – don’t do me no favor, keep your love to yourself!

                Guilt then is potential love, the onus of love. We may feel guilty at seeing another suffer, however, in the sheer pleasure that it is not us, as if it should be. We want to pay for our happiness as if it were given to us by the sufferer. The heart is also cruel, there is pleasure in seeing suffering, but we don’t experience that immediately, it has been converted into guilt. The beautiful, happy, innocent ones in life are easy prey to the envious who want to make them feel guilty for their happiness, as if happiness were a privilege, not a natural state of being. Healthy, beautiful, happy, innocent, the are probably naïve, and subject to such demoralizing moral language. The healthy are thus made slaves of the sick, who have the wits to use language to insinuate as if their health were the cause of sickness, or as if some person or God blessed them, gave them health, to whom they owe a debt: “Woe to those who laugh.” In this, praising God, thanking God, attributing one’s happiness to God is a way to poke the evil eye and say “God made me happy, how dare you fault God?”

                Pride, called crown of the virtues by Aristotle, called the cardinal sin by Christians, comes as a threat to guilt-systems, to the ownership of souls. Pride, self-love, self-satisfaction, self-respect, self-sufficiency, independence, autonomy, strike many as being anti-religious, as blasphemous, as the greatest threat to religion. The constellation of terms is the power and the pleasure of being oneself, the opposite of guilt. Pride is deserved self-respect, delighting in one’s own powers. The proud man owes no debts. Pride as the opposite of guilt can be its conversion. Through the alchemy of self-reflection and self-understanding, one can convert his guilt not by denial, which leaves the guilt intact and active, but in changing its substance, from being owned by the lover into self-ownership, a duty to oneself.

                Pride is the self-overcoming of guilt, not its distribution through a system, the contracting ourselves amidst a world of lovers. We solve guilt by thickening relations, distributing guilt through favors or kindness, or in becoming more autonomous in pride. In that sense, guilt is money, a promissory note, we give it to make contracts, to establish relationships. Pride as autonomy is individual, or alternatively, group pride is the pride of being in a group independent of other groups, self-important, powerful. The sense that one’s gift is important because he is a man of high standing, has aura, charisma, pride, self-regard, an unshakable self-image that negotiates and overcomes the world’s image of him, shows the dynamic between love and pride, between love and power, in other words, the fear and its self-overcoming through courage and the triumph of distances.

                Love is guilt. And so pride as self-love is self-guilt, or a sense of responsibility, indebtedness to ourselves, which means, in other words, the dignity and self-reverence that we must take care of ourselves. For this one may sacrifice parts of himself for his greater self, give up weak pleasure for austere pleasure, improve, grow, triumph. Pride would be ashamed to let itself go.

                And yet pride is not self-love so much as self-respect, an esteem of one’s power, whereas vanity typically is concerned with one’s loveliness and beauty. How does the proud man love? With self-respect unwilling to debase himself to feel loved, for he loves himself more than he loves being loved by others. And yet love in its guilt wants an intimacy, a vulnerability, a sharing of secrets for the pact of mutual blackmail, from the sense of trust that such a position gives. In this, at least, pride and love must negotiate, one cannot be all love or all pride. Marriage is humiliation. Knowing how to handle this humiliation while negotiating your self-respect is wisdom, and the sages teach it.

                Knowing to at times humble yourself and humiliate yourself is shrewd. Beyond love and power, or guilt and pride, is the necessity and freedom that set them all into place, that play at the game of life. The ecosystem of the heart, the preying of emotion upon emotion, and desire upon desire, the conversion of weak into strong, makes the system grow, the heart grow harder at parts and more tender at others. The heart is a circle, and allist abides all kinds.

 

 

\ ~@M@~ /

perfectidius.com

 

Lissidy and Ama

Lissidy and Ama

 

Lissidy kisséd me, blithefully blesséd me

And Amazhiar came to the strain

Saw me before the reflecting one’s name,

Summoned by praise duly her own

Faced Maid-Satan, the daughter of song.

Trope-star and venal, faced Lissidy’s ire

I drew towards Ama and gave her my love.

 

Lissidy accused me of darkness depressed

But in withdrawing from the mirror

Was snagged and undressed by a rose

Set there, a duty of dawn

And Ama with scalpel faced the dark one,

The river of gold, the shallow stone mirror

Who Opened her heart, Ama sneered

And thrust the blade to shatter the glare

Lissidy bled out and in mercury disappeared.

 

Ama drank up the silvery pool

Her menses united with Lissidy’s cool

Reflective blood and darktime tropes.

 

I left her there to return to the earth

And battle the dawn as duty demands.

Singing songs to Ama to understand the days

Until I return to night to see my love

Lissidy containing, who bleeds silvery ink

Through the Eru pen, who has the scalpel

On my own heart – in me in all.

 

 

 

 

\ ~@M@~ /

perfectidius.com