An involved and extended essay about how to convert moods into mood using ideas, language, and gestures. Born from my moody disposition, it details what I've learned on how to put the moods "in standard notation" to make them workable for daily duty and creativity.
daniel
Mood Alchemy
Language is the magic that converts a heart, changes happiness to sadness and sadness to happiness. Such spells, such music, are the stuff of the poet, the manifestation of his genius– his purpose and proper station as a man of the tongue. And to this task, we come to the scene in a world of languages – every language is a world; bare facts are a mere substrate. "Self-help" language, this plucky, too-positive-to-be-believed set of affirmations and mantras, bases itself upon a few feeling tones and images. But such a language, such a personality, is unlikely to endure in the life of suffering if he is unable to rally resources through alchemical magic. Fear must be made into courage; guilt must be made into pride; uncertainty must be made into bravery – and sometimes the other way too. We need alchemical converters of moods into moods.
All the religions already incorporate the alchemical symbols, the converters, with their figures, with their mythic tropes, which act as catalysts, as standards and principles for orthodox approaches to life’s myriad situations. Satan for instance is a parody of intellectual self-conscience. By learning of his “temptations,” which seem rather straightforward and silly for a purported super-genius, we master the dangers of rational thought and honest doubt. The literary character is a mental conversion tool. Incredible cunning is expended into demonizing honest questioning – the work of sermons is to make honest doubt an envenomed net filled with hidden stratagems. Doubt, which is the mouth of knowledge, comes to stand for sin, and belief – an incredulous childlike conviction that whatever is said with authority must be true – is presented as the apex of morality. Blessed are the stupid, for they’ll believe anything.
Religion is programmatic art: it makes us dancers of life, actors in the drama so defined. It sets the stage, it tells us what the basic plot is. It gives us a hammer and tells us to see all problems as nails; tells us the one big problem in life is “sin,” and the one basic solution is “forgiveness.”
That, at least, is popular Christianity. Sophisticated Christians make of it a sophisticated game; simple Christians make of it a simple game; but as with life and love, the wise are tricked through wise means, the simple through simple means, but each gets what is coming to him. So much more so is this true for the other world religions with their own tropes and focuses. So much more so for Allism, which is in each and all of them, and disparages them only pragmatically. Ama, who says baldly “I love you with all my life,” is through whatever we happen to love. Who or what we call “God” or “Nature” or “the Future” or “Goodness” is almost a matter of indifference, so long as we fill it with our soul. What we as individuals make of it is our redemption to the world, our difference, our purpose. And so as we all strive in this Mundania of real life, we lead genre-lives. Our lives take on different roles, we live different stories. But embedded in each genre is a self, a unique self, the source of our substance; and consubstantial with this is the experience made there from.
We carry the idea of our childhood home in our head, an epitomized symbol – and all emotions cloister around an idiolect of such images. Art presents forms and content, the content is also our lives, by metaphor – a crossover of forms or ideal relationships, from art to our own experience. To be the artist is to set the forms and genres; those who write in somebody else’s genre, who bow to some other god, are the work of that artist, that god, are mere angels to those gods, are followers, have not realized their own potential, do not see the infinitude of their own private person. It is for the alchemist, the magician, to learn the powers by which he opens his own soul of power. By that he gains his apotheosis and is able to make a difference for Ama. Ultimately, he must let his self become his person.
A personality is a dynamic thing for which we have a taste and memory, such that we can memorize and differentiate between thousands and hundreds-of-thousands of faces – and yet a personality cannot be seen simply in an instance, but to be plumbed requires accidental and fatal contrasts with other personalities. A friend brings out our best, our worst; an enemy brings out our best, our worst; when a woman falls in life with trouble, everybody winces. And yet what everybody knows may be wrong. Perhaps them getting it wrong, their prejudice, is the catalyst by which the surprise comes forth. We can do a thing because we don’t know it’s impossible. We must fail repeatedly to win. The milk sacrament of Allism, which takes the milk of the monarch as the type for us – pain first, pleasure last – accepts what is in the world, whatever station, whatever pride or shame we find ourselves in, as our platform of apotheosis, once we set to interpreting it as thus. Breakthroughs are gifts. To find an author who opens our heart, converts our turgid emotions into powers – each clause a chapter head, a literature drowning us in details or a poetry of austerity -- whatever it takes to make a substitution, that function of symbol, substitution, transformation, abbreviation, paraphrase, simplification, and complication, that sets our fingers on the laws of mind. Poets and heroes mirror us back on our best.
Alchemy was not scientifically fruitful, but nevertheless was psychologically true, claimed Jung, who was at last clever enough to read a lot of psychological insights into alchemical tropes. The principle of conversion, of converting the materials of the mind, one into another, is as good a metaphor as any. The law of the mind, the psychological laws, are difficult to know scientifically; there is no science of virtue. Law is negative. Law negates. The mind also is negative, it is a negative space that allows ideas to at times fill it. We come to maturity when we can use the mind and its negative space to clear us of habit and world and make a space of negation in which to work our magic. Irony is maturity. Having distance from a situation, carefully crafting a mask, a me, a me-for certain situations – how useful! How pragmatic! Is not pragmatism our basic world virtue? Let us create such clothes for our I, therefore, and in our delight in direct simple speech allow some rhetorical circumlocutions – indirect truths, for some truths are only approached indirectly. Virtue balances virtue.
Some direct questions are answered with direct lies. Why place blame? Others can’t be direct, not about their heart. They have to lie. The only way to get at their truth is through indirections, innuendos, through byways and sidestreams. We require, as always, time before the mirror to see in ourselves what we first saw in others. That dual mirror: seeing in others what we discover in ourselves, and seeing in ourselves what we discover in others – in being willing to accuse yourself of what you blame in your enemy, in being willing to praise yourself for what you praise in your hero, is self-expansion, the expanding of your possibility. You must purify your experiences, look for the chemically pure experience that epitomizes the substance of the idea you would create. You need to create your tool-making tools – sharpen your knives, judge your judgment -- but most of all, learn how to interpret interpretation. Language is a tool. Meta-language, or a language for language, the writers' craft, the readers’ criticism, allow you to put your hand around your tools, to get beyond your situation. The mirror is our symbol and tool not for self-love, but self-knowledge. By knowing what we are, in and out of our world, we can change worlds.
This world-place we find ourselves in – world is situation – fastens and fascinates us. How to comprehend it? We meet strangers – most the world is strange – and this embarrassment we feel in the face of the unknown reminds us that mystery is guilt. The pride of identity we take when we see something beautiful we know to be ours should, with clever interpretation, allow us to find in anyone or anything a beautiful part of ourselves. Just as Hitler formulated the perfect enemy, in Mein Kampf, putting all evil into one people, so we can make saints of an inner circle, of a historical set of people who speak most to us. We will make the perfect friends -- comrades. The ability to disperse thoughts and search the world -- and all world religions and philosophies for useful terms -- that is allistic. To be able to put all divine truth into the mouth of your won god -- she is behind the multitudes -- this domesticates all foreign power.
I am Ovath and my thoughts are a thousand monarchs, ever wandering, migrating, impregnating the world while slipping from me, forgetting, to return together in the hot of winter. These worms, vulcanized on sour milk, flaunt the airwaves. I blink upon a foreign idea. A blink is self-blinding. I note my blink and pause and try to see again what I had first unseen. I see I am an individual, ultimately, metaphysically, but that I’ve identified with various groups, groups in conflict with one another. We speak as individuals, as group members, and as universals, with a memory like a palimpsest, with the old material written with the new. We pick the tones of each group, the flight, the flutter and glide of that monarch, we pick up the moral tone, the self-help cadence, the religious reflection, the small talk, the gossip. By identifying with a flutter of me’s, various me’s for the places of the world, we set collectors of ideas, we absorb world energies and convert them to our own purpose. Transcendence is seeing this in terms of that. The Metaphor Mind bridges the attitude of feelings and the mind of ideas. If we can in arrogance embody social tension, if we can play that role, we can just as well humbly reconcile the pains group costs group. Our moods and tones are inlets for our place. This pressure to speak is not my own, but a world pressures me to speak. Each day I am charged, each night I discharge. I write in exultation and am thus able to express the finger fold, as seen in Van Gogh’s starry night, the waving interlocking of fingertips to fingertips, the gesture of self-reflection, by which mood is converted to mood and tone is converted to tone. The three concentric rings of independence, creativity, and pragmatism make the harmony of the spheres called "compensation." The inner balance the outer.
All the beauty in this beautiful world is your beauty, belongs to you, fills you by the beholding. External beauty symbolizes and represents inner beauty. You see beauty to become beautiful. The terms of your approach empower you to identify. What you can through words know, you can let near enough to touch, so long as you open your eyes to see. Terms are lenses. You observe and, your observations are already an interpretation. Observations are often mere implications. We choose a terministic screen, a set of ideas drawn from education or experience that we will charge by reading meaning into them. Thus we add supernatural power to natural things. All terms for angels, scriptures, gods, the divine are in fact mundane natural objects that are supercharged with meanings. The meanings exasperate what the object can contain. Because the metaphors are mixed, and hence paradoxical, they add a waft of wonder, a trace of grace to these terms. If personality is the agent of speech, these supercharged ideas, these symbols, net meaning and value through our personality, how we speak of them, how we apply them to the world. The accidents of history become essence of destiny. The accidents of our own life become God’s purpose for us. Attitude is complete. It is rounded like pragmatism, it balances like a circle, it is pure compensation. Religion offers controls, gives us buttons and levers for the heart and soul. The myths let ups treat principles temporally, and let us use our life stories to build principles. The premises we assume are seeds for a fuller system. Memory becomes the structure of experience. Our memories shape how we experience new things, new memories build on the old, and are shaped and distorted by the old. A few terms make the system. Holding contradictory terms that antagonize each other gives us wiggle room, room to play, space to balance.
If consumed in a mood and unable to escape the mind’s lack of focus, one needs permission to be the sloth and slow down, to contemplate, to ruminate, to reflect. Perhaps an epiphany is afoot – when ideas we had humored or toyed with or entertained or feared cease their unrest and fall into an organic formal arrangement. The crises of life align us in new skins. Different terminologies leave us unmoved, but when they overlap in interesting ways, so we can finally peg down five terms with one experience, we have our epiphany. We read our own meaningful experiences into the dead language of philosophy or religion, and in this way we redeem God.
We come to art to correct and perfect ourselves. Art is the perfection of nature. What was painful in the heart was blissful in art; once sung, our deepest pains are in fact enjoyed. So we come to this homeopathic tragedy and see how life is so important that it is worth living even in its most painful and unjust instances. Tragedy teaches us life is worth living. We receive the metamorphosis: not new ideas, but a new attitude to fulfill those ideas.
Try as they might, scientists can’t reduce society to nature. Society, which is the spiritual, or the supernatural, proper, with gods and angels standing as tropes and symbols of language, ultimately, the eternity of language, we each come to add our own new word to the world; we welcome it up with an archetypal form and spend the rest of our life in its refinement. Even William Gass, who is ugly in his ideas and images, has at least the idea of the labyrinthine sentence, of which I am so much a practitioner, the various clauses that like a kaleidoscope-show of different angles, various perspectives of the same idea, so that we became a man who represents his world. The lubricated phrases, the liquidity of form, characterize my autonomy and success over the world, as those who live in their head make paper transgressions, and this living finely knit text is my resurrection. My scaffolding for the creation of life today and tomorrow. What overwhelms us we must address. I turn to the alchemy of moods because they are too severe for me: my panics rise like a cymbal and I must unchoke myself from an anxiety. I must always use my mind and its ideas to transform words into each other. There are times I must simply hold on to the fence and let pain pass through me, till I process it in my skin and guts. Later in life I can bring it to truth.
The control board, the buttons and levers I place over my body, the gestures, dances, the recourse to caffeine, alcohol, sex, and so forth, are buttons, for change, especially the dialogue between Ama divine and the I of my own mind, convert in conversation one affect into another. Form is desire. I become a formalist, a methodist, a methodologist; I seek the allform, I invent the panacea, my body becomes the panacea to be planted in the earth, at my death world-medicine. These miniature plots that make up an idea, the mundane interest of novel facts, this journalist’s take at information, which has the potential to surprise on the first day, but not the principles of character, with its suspense, balanced against timeless truths which I repeat endlessly, in every sentence, in ever essay – that is how we balance desires with ugliness, with too much, with exaggeration. Ugliness cures ugliness, vice balances vices. We each have a morality individuated from our tradition, our virtues are culled and differentiated from our world situation. In this I am like all men; I make my world out of the materials at hand, but in reflection, which is independence, my central virtue, I come to own it, properly, and open the door, a door named Lissidy, that allows my inner shine to emerge. Creativity is the soul that mixes self and world; pragmatism is the touch on earth that makes a vision work. We must balance our necessity of self against our world situation.
Stoical wisdom warns against letting our happiness depend on what is beyond our control. Longing for sex, fame, and money, for instance, could only demoralize an artist who had something of actual value to bring into the world: nothing the world could repay him could equal what is truly his to give; thus it is a gift, and the poor enrich the world. So in our many moods we would with Ovath put them to use, would make a place for every inflection. We create a work of art, we make our relationships these idealized things. A work may be popular, beautiful, and influential, all three as separate categories, with a given work in multiple categories, or in only one of them, or none at all. The true artist may be lost to posterity, for his focus is on aesthetic problems, or problems of pure form; problems, which relate to the creation of his own heaven, to his apotheosis. The ideas of them are in the work, just as character and plot are ultimately neither more nor less than ideas explicated.
My romance with Amazhiar is one of continually delayed union; I took as a lover the impossible one, I always made her impossible, because she meant too much to me, she means everything to me – this Goddess and all her manifestations: Her embrace is eternity, is death. Being the allmeaning, being the allthing, it was necessary to keep distance, and yet to invite Ama into the inner communication of my mind. In the same way, the author perpetuates the same idea in all his work; everything he writes is a configuration of that self-same idea. The mental equipment, the ideas he picks up double that inner necessity, the necessity to express his innermost self, but a lifetime of education must socialize and allow him to communicate, for self-expression without communication goes unreceived.
We are a society that grows on its vices. As the genius of Charles Ives taught us, democracy is discord. In this pluralverse, with an Allmother who is merely one more God, and though her body contains us all, she is not omniscient -- we have things to teach her. The All grows and learns, and so do we, with her and yet independent from her. With all these states, organizations, corporations, churches, these centers and circles of power, freedom is between centers, in the interstices. We require our no-man’s land, our own castle, our castle Sheridan, our place to hole ourselves in the womb of creation and fill Ama with our genius. We become experts at ourselves. Success is impossible without self-importance – this the artist intuits. A humble artist – oxymoron! We formulate our own experiences into rituals and make our religion. Art is our religion. Our heart is our canvas. We create forms and the spirit of those forms become the heaven of our eternity. Form creates desire. Repetition of principle under new forms makes the entire stock of ideas of a given artist: it is Proteus, variations of the same. The coordinates of our soul are visible in our art, visible for those who can read and know, the ones with empathy. And empathy negates abuse: love can’t bite. Pure love touches us. Love is touch. What techniques do we use to establish our deepest effects? Techniques nobody could teach us. We build on patterns of experience. Just as jealousy is creative, and imagines men she could have loved, so does each mood dream, and we come to love our daydreams and nightmares, and as true prophets enliven them as self-fulfilling prophecies. This requires the alchemy of self-reflection. With that space and audacity, whatever we dare we can at last grasp and achieve.
There is a dream and there is its quality. No mere report of the dream can allow others to feel it; we must resort to language not present in the dream, “It was as if I was underwater” or some sort. We come to translate our peculiar dreams, that dream that is our innermost experience of life itself, to conventionalized language. We find a few likely tropes and convert all experience to that favored tone, that favorite rhetoric, till we are like Zizek, whose abuse of paradox as form becomes sheer mannerism, making the reader cringe each time he reduces a problem to some annoying paradox. What become our favorite expression is a verbal tic, not exact truth.
Our days become mannerisms. Relaxation after work – what form will it take? The relaxation is the extension of work, is colored by work. We couldn’t relax without the work, but jobless we would fall into despondency. “I’ll have a beer after work,” but if you quit work and had the beer you wouldn’t enjoy it. We need the pain to build it like clay into something substantial. Experience is by nature painful, it is in the form of pain until it can be formulated into something useful. Beauty is the promise of use. Use is beauty. For everything in its most useful form has beauty. We have an emotion, but modify it in expression. Despair can be beautiful. Modified, perfected, brought to apotheosis, it is worthy of existence, makes all of life worthy of existence, the way the tragedies are paeans to life. Themes inspire counter-themes and beauty is a sanctified emotion. What is beauty but ugliness well-formed? The rawness is replaced with the refined. We use a form for sheer love of that form. Form holds desire, and by having form fills us with desire. Symbol is a formula for a type of experience. We build our experiences into symbols, into language. We have our epiphanies and then make our epiphanies into rituals. That feeling of expansion that is spiritual enlargement is the aesthetic.
Allism in its grandiosity wades into enemy territory, would secure beauty wherever she beckons, hears the muse call and gives ear to the siren. It seeks discipline in its lived experience the way military discipline and football discipline instill and inform those who endure them. We hold also to our own, our unique experience. Derivative works becomes popular. Genius is difficult, and few can understand. The great writers are sources, are fountainheads. The popularizes are easier to understand, but they are angels, and not gods, and their wells are mortal, their wells dry up. They are not the fountainmouths, not the eternal increase.
Original experience pierces the wall and lets the inner light shine. Lacking beauty we compensate with sex. Deferring necessary pain we compensate with entertainment. The artist, however, is able to behold the thing itself. Real experience is much thicker and less pure than art. Art is purified, simplified, intensified; there is no substitute for life in art. Art clarifies our own experience, but it cannot replace them. Art perfects life, and life would forever be imperfect without art’s finishing touches. Life comes first. The “birth of a myth in the grand style expressing a new sense of divinity” means, ultimately, self-reliance, knowing God face to face, knowing Ama to be imminent for you alone in reflection -- getting at your own life. Your attitude will open the door. Attitudes are fluid and fill marriage, athletics, work, whatever you do. A problem finds many expressions in art, many symbols, but the original touch – love is touch – comes from that divine, and the name she tells to you as yours for her.
Each new novel is a new world, a new word, a new term, a new method. It gives symbols and symbols symbolize patterns of experience. For this we are grateful for our Authors as true gods. The artist becomes master at a pattern of experiences. His symbols are formulas. They inform our thinking and conform our lives to simple purpose. In this, the head virtue of order structures all.
The artist as alchemist uses art as the most exact and exacting language for formulating precise experiences, for transforming them through communication, through music, through conversation with the divine, as pain into pain, a chaotic pain into a useful pain, and from pain to distance, and from distance to power. The alchemy of moods requires inventing gestures, symbols, terms and words that give you command of your habits and set them against each other, with each other, for each other, under the shared purpose of a life’s necessity, that self-expression and world-communion we call living the life of Allism.
The man who gossips his heart, and complains for the world to pity or withdraw, would do better changing those pigeon songs into control tones, using tones of mood and body as buttons and lever for converting affect into affect. We all seek for the mood we are comfortable in. Our attitude prefers a basic situation. It is a situation we perhaps found ourselves thrust into as children, and have since become accustomed to it. Perhaps we seek to glorify a father and then dethrone him; perhaps we want to be the best in the class; perhaps we want to be the misunderstood genius. Whatever situation we are comfortable in, we will drive all other situations into so resembling them. Since the world bends to our expectations and we live in an ambience of ambiguity, the world conforms itself to the situation we prefer. Just as the man with a hammer sees all problems as nails, so the feminist sees all problems as patriarchic oppression, and the Christian sees sin.
An allist, likewise, sees self, sees expression, sees personal purpose. In the complexity of life we seek the arrow of direct truth, to have the devastating truth always at hand. Complexity versus power, and to digest complexity into power requires study, the repetition of studying the same thing over and over, and through circumlocutions arriving at direct measures. This is why we set up our own symbols, charged as they must be with images and stories. We invent our own rituals, for a ritual makes a setting for an experience. We come to art as medicine to cure our exaggerations, but we come to art as connoisseurs as well, looking for the exact expression, the perfect word. We balance every means. We are monistic in our purpose, pluralistic in our means. Monism lacks balance and correction. We would also enjoy classic repose were it not for this romantic disturbance that aches our heart towards greatness. Our independence seeks endless blank spaces in which to create. We digest the universe, we make a world, we make, ultimately, a heaven for ourselves.
A subject is unpoetical only insofar as capable poets haven’t yet converted it. All matter is convertible to good; all lead to gold, all manure to fruit. Progress is digesting all this indigestible material, sucking diamonds down to their essence, and building in our womb Pandora, the all gifted, who from our raccoon diet takes good from all we eat. To be all we must eat all. To find our purpose we must liberally experiment. Haydn greatly resented Beethoven’s liberties with the sonata form, and rightly so, but who knew Beethoven’s business better than Beethoven? Traditionalism and conservativism are right; progressiveness and liberalism is right. They are all right and all against each other. This democracy of dissonance, which is the music of Ives, is the melting pot, the ultimate witches brew by which Panacea comes. The mercury of mercurial moods, the bipolar shift of anxiety and liberality, alone is enough to melt all experience and in the melting point of hell’s womb make the highest hope heaven’s child. By being most evil we arrive at utter innocence.
Language dissolves all things. The ineffable is of worth only insofar as it is really effable. Lacking that, it carries the weight of a drug experience. The smuggled term is a meaning meant without the word. These ineffable experiences are smuggled terms – they express themselves in tones of words, but not in words. When we can reflect on our experience of the divine, when she can talk to us voice to voice, then in our panics, in our anxiety, in our depressions, we can edit our own thought and speech, with reflection, with the constrictive moods we can come down and join life and earth. We develop in our perfidious nature, in our atheism, in our cynicism, a critical language, which outwits those who would control us with tones.
And so we fail again and again, and succeed in educating ourselves through constant failure. Having written a fiction and failed, one still grows as a critic. The absolute moment of the self expresses itself through endless time, through the infinite melody of daily life. Eru, the god of writing and music, dances on air, his boots are guitar chords, his heart is melody. What more could I as writer aspire to than to inspire aspirants? Striving for liquid sentences or resounding nouns and lubricated verbs, fluid clauses that dance like rivers of tongue – this is the alchemy of my night, the true dawning of my mind. The threading of pen through intimacy and alienation as with the in and out of intimate conversation requires touch and withdrawal, the rhythm of union. The distance of technology allows for unique touch.
This internet that is our latest plaything allows us to live as avatars, as abbreviated and masked deities in the logosphere. To mine and make the understructure, the electronic pacifier allows this -- that technological fantasy, that hum of possibility. We try our minds, we seek criticism, and we need never doubt that our soul is worthy of the highest heaven despite every sin and crime – in fact because of them, because the heart is round, because we need all emotions. Can rational criticism stop the power of an idea? Our ultimate motivation is not force of logic, but persuasion of narrative. We are living myths. Mythic integrity is Proteus, can take myriad forms. We are situated in a given religion, time, space, family, we drink from our roots and tap what powers there be. Ideas grow from the soil, the climate, the health or sickness of the group mind, of the private brain, of the one who created it and would be master thereof. The compensation of life taxes the good and indemnifies the bad; and of the innermost soul there is no tax, but only eternal increase. During a plague the gravedigger feasts. And so in all situations part of us is learning. I therefore reject the language of obligation as such unless the language of interest or incipient power is pre-framed therein. Ama is my allthing, I need never shiver at pious cant.
All this guilt inflects the basic expectations we impose on children. Children’s television best isolates the Law of Niceness, the sort of ethic I envision for the utopia Solman sought to disintegrate, in my book Lux. Egalitarian niceness to all people is the basic premise, everybody gets a turn. Bragging or even winning isn’t nice. And such tone controls are placed early, we can’t escape them. Guilt-tripping your son and shaming him are different matters. “Feel bad about yourself” verses “feel you are less.” Never mind that: there is nothing more rotten than pious talk. Love resists such rebuffs. Where love is, it cannot for long be hidden; where love is not, it cannot for long be faked. Love is not chosen, beauty is irresistible. Power is, is and properly; and between love and power we have the vertices of human motivation. We need both, but we need also to exhibit what is ours to give. Feminism stipulates that women would be men too were they not oppressed – they would be brave, rational, genius, this sort of thing -- but as such an equality is achieved only by barring male expressions, the equality is artificial and unsustainable. It is an ideal, and ideals are rotten.
In this I am taught by the resentful and clever Lissidy, the River of Life, the lush fullness of the river banks’ peach. I mean the edgy castrating pitch of the hiddenness of female genius. Lissidy is The Daughter, Ama’s subtle innermost mirror image. She too goes into the Idius, into my psyche, into the writing of my soul’s text. I write my full being in her reflection, in every inflection.
A book is written on paper in Mundania, and it is written at time zero in the logosphere – it always was at a moment of pure contact. Eru the God of writing, in that pen, the ink and spill of Lux, all language, which is, in sum, is the divine mother tongue, writes out from my pen as well.
We take such religious experiences as nearest to the place of Allism, but any experience would do. A temptation is to find one’s own religion deepest merely because he’s happened to have profound experience therein, and not in the foreign ones, and can flatter himself by his ability to read more into it than others, but to thus deny the stranger his treasure. Religion after all is part of rhetoric. Language is a God. We in our atheism resecularize religious terms. They were secular to begin with, of course. We seek to establish enough coordinates to give us space to move, and in this pluralverse of gods, and the allgoddess who is them all, and the universe who is her and matter, we seek interstices, spaces of ambiguity to develop ourselves. The negative is the space of freedom and possibility. Conscious mind in its pureness is a bit of utter nothingness, a nothingness by which will and freedom create all.
This is why we seek an alchemy, for the moodswings of life are the flights of Eru, that rockstar god who is the bright of both day and night. He gives us instruments for transversing both logosphere and mythosphere. He teaches the control tones and commanding gestures.
How is the sacred so kept? Ultimately, by violence. Imaginative violence, and violent fantasies and speech, not to mention violent laws -- and all laws are enforced by violence -- keep the sacred from blasphemy. But wisdom is analogizing. Wisdom is the capacity for analogy. To see theology in literary terms, to see all in the menstruum of philosophy, of the logosphere, which allows us to use words, to make words, to make and break laws. These deeds and contracts are the positive and negative of every declaration. Communication is love, language is love; Lux is the language of love, the goddess of desire. The lovers name and play and are magical in their way. We learn to praise and love God by praising and loving men. We learn from men and praise God for what they do, the same way God imitates the gods and then claims they imitated him first. What matters in all these deities is a mundane correlation to justify it all. Internal change requires an external cataclysm. Great inner changes are possible only at death and tragedy.
Eternity happens in time and before time – the fullness of time in a static instance. Apotheotic transcendence means the divine must already pre-exist within us. Atheistic or theist, we learn from the other. We convert a word from the enemy, are shameless in our allistic vocabulary. We find what words matter most to us, find the word worth watching. The deeper terms of a writer are unwritten, yet are read, not here or there, but everywhere. He gives us a technology of thought by which to build our own heaven. Indeed, technology is heaven. It’s as if the mythic events happened behind Mundania, as if a jet struck a building in the real world, a god descended on earth in the myth-world.
Mundane limitations are also eternal the temporal is commemorated and assumed. Money is pain, pain is money. Suicide and mortification view pain as if a form of money. We pay for our guilty with pain. We could say all men die because all men sin, but all animals die as well, and none have sinned. Death, instead, is natural, is blameless, there is no guilt in death -- and yet guilt feels like death. What accounts for this? Guilt too is natural, as natural as childbirth, and we merely need the processing terms, the translations, the terminologies, the maintaining ratios. Power is murder. To have the power to set distances, to set space, to enforce space, that is ultimate power. Death is transformation, symbolizes frustration overcome. Conflicts are solved in time. Apotheosis is a symbolic suicide to make life eternal, the way marriage is saved through symbolic divorce. Suicide, the ultimate control over the self, must be translated from the heart breaking act to its apotheosis as self-divination. And the alchemy of psychology reaches its peak in this: we die by poison, by the poison of experience, by the words of pain, only to become ourselves, not poison, but panacea, world-cure, all-cure, so that our bodies in living and in death purify the earth and restore nature to her beauty. In this, the gesture, the ritual, the aloneness solves the anxiety, the panic attacks, the guilt, the confusion. We are eternal because we have already died. And how do we do this? By giving ourselves a new name and devouring it into the secrecy of our heart.
The ritual is simple and lived out in every sickness and depression. We shed in such moments irrelevant skins, and in a gesture of self-destruction, which is ultimately eternalization, self-glorification, "I die to the world and give birth to a new world," to suffer the recriminations of Lissidy, our accuser, our deepest self-doubts, is to overcome their hold, to die to them. Let all self-doubt become open direct truth. With nothing to prove, we discover our proof. Defenseless, and invulnerable through vulnerability -- a touch to the temple, a grasp of the heart, such a personal sign language that symbolizes through gestures the successes of our adventures in meditation, allow us to convert moods while living them, with the idea as converter, and the gesture as what summons the idea. To have a few characters, a few metaphors, a personal language of control, we can convert all our moods from moods we struggle with to moods by which we win.
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