Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:
Greetings!
So fall is here and now all three of my children are in school during the weekdays. Nevertheless, I struggle, on account of the depression of the bipolar cycle, and am hoping, least of all, to secure my job. I've had less energy for writing, so I've taken to revising my first novel, written in 2006, Madeye. After that is rewritten, using 11 years of editing skills I've since developed, I plan on publishing my books (rather than just self-publishing them).
As for long term goals, in 5 years, around 2022 or so, all our debts will be paid off, the children will of course have grown, and I may return to the University to seek a vocation in professing.
Not much more to report than that. Hope you are all doing well. Please write.
Take Care, Caretakers!
* 799 *
Deep Reading. Like Odin, we would learn from every direction, leaving no stone unturned. Where there is light there is vision. Yet, much can be said for intrinsic reading, or the New Criticism, Close Readings, that line of thought. In college, I lead a series of friends in an online reading of Matthew's Sermon on the Mount, rereading the passage so many times I accidentally committed it to memory. Never did I resort to a commentary or second-hand text. I read it intrinsically, broad-outlining the text and then micro-outlining, before going to the theological experts for their correctives. Attempt your own before learning from others.
I committed myself to a Deep Reading of Emerson's "Self Reliance" as well, and have, a few times over the years, committed myself to Deep Reading a worthy book, or a significant portion. We can deep watch a film, deep analyze a person, all that is required is repeated exposures to the material, outlining, and writing a long commentary on the topic. Intense repetition and extensive annotation and outlining are the methods. By Deep Reading significant passages from a work gives us the tent pegs to fasten a canopy of understanding.
* 800 *
Ama, Goddess, Lord of morning, wake me, take me, dawn and sate me, raise me up and bright my eyes. Ama, Mother, brow of daystar, open up my eyes to dawn.
* 801 *
"Never confess," my friend recommends, and yet I've had such a confessional nature this whole while, would hate for anybody to feel ashamed merely because their friends lacked the courage to say "Me too." Even as a kid I would tell on myself, and as an adult I sharpen my writing skills to best express what I know of my soul. Expressivity, and its reciprocation, is the opposite of depressiveness and its isolation. To finally be heard by the right person, to be echoed and returned – what bliss!
* 802 *
In my ruin is my triumph. I read and reread the same difficult chapter repeatedly, making geological strata of notes upon notes, and finally quit, having numbed my instruments too far to read a word more. I've failed. And yet something latent has seeded, I have not at all failed, but have allowed an epiphany which will at last finally come. The same with the friendship I strived to save but lost, or the job I dogged at but lost. Ours is a game of patience. Patience is power. The struggle to the bitter end means never losing, or only seeming so, and only for a time.
When we sink to the inner layer of touch, the penetrative membrane, we transfer deep meanings. Only in rare instances does a friendship open up this intimate touch.
* 803 *
The two missionary religions, Buddhism and Christianity, simplified their parent faiths, so that Christianity could encapsulate Jewish Law into two spiritualized commands – Love your "neighbor" as yourself, and Love God with all your being; and Buddhism could boil away Vedic myths and rituals into Four Noble Truths. Between them they claimed most the earth, Christianity the West, and Buddhism the East, so much so, that one does not have to have read the Bible to derive his original ideas from it, so harshly and fanatically have they been ploughed into history, such that the atheist Dawkins provides zero original moral ideas, but secularizes Christianity much as Deist Thomas Jefferson produced his demythologized version of the Gospels. Hegel, Marx, the Declaration of Independence, Kenneth Burke, gain important points by secularizing this religious creed so that no matter who we are, when we first pick up the New Testament, we anticipate what we are to discover.
There is nothing worth disputing but matters of taste, and people crash jets into buildings in order to insist on their manner of worshipping the God. What every religion amounts to – the New Testament with its redundant gospels followed by even more redundant epistles to ancient churches; Buddhism with its easy to understand meditation practices; are making a tone-poems, a cluster of images, so that these things go with those things, and this with that.
In American, currently, we have two viable political parties to chose from: Democrat and Republican. Each offers a cluster of stances on the issues, and amazingly, amidst all the various issues possible, you can vote A or B. Who said an economically liberal stance goes with pro-life, but egalitarian stances go with pro-choice? What if there are more than two combinations amidst the hundreds and thousands of ideas – suggesting endless combinations – we can choose from politically. But this is a democracy, and the demos needs simplicity: A or B.
Poets make the world. The poets preceded the politicians, and even the philosophers, when their fiat declares, A, B, and C go together, and D, E, and F go together as a separate cluster. Beauty made the world and beauty rules it. We fight over matters of taste, necessarily, and why not, since we have a sense of taste to avoid poison?
The audacious daystars, be they ever so modest and shy, declare "this, this and this." Later, heroes, who lack such original vision, find inspiration from the poets, and what was first whispered they will now shout, "This, this and this!" The creative child tosses the circle: what we choose in childhood we live as adults.
Alexander the Great carried Homer's scriptures in a golden receptacle wherever his campaign led him. The Poet comes first.
* 804 *
What does truth have to do with success? If you have the ambition, facts matter little. If you have a minority of the people, but a majority of the willpower, you will win. Christopher Columbus had no ambition to discover America, but he opened the West to Europe; the Spanish with their dreams of gold cities and fountains of youth took on armies a hundred times larger than their own. I am little impressed with facts and the nihilism that attends them. Give me a dream worth fighting for: we will take the world.
-- R ᴤ88s Я --
Perfection Is Easy
www.perfectidius.com
AMA LAUGHS!
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