update, allays 824-828

Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:

Greetings!

I've decided to keep this up as a sort of weekly thing. The allays have slowed way down now that I am approaching 1000 of them. I dunno if the project will end or simply proceed at a modest pace. I am waiting the next project to announce itself. I can't will such things; they will me.

At the homefront, things are better: Natalie is a little less difficult lately. Emilie and Theron are celebrating their 8^th and 5^th birthdays, respectively. As I mentioned before, we will be financially secure in five years, when I hope to go back to college; but before that I hope to publish (as opposed to self-publish) some of the many books I've put out there.

The therapy I deliver at Pine Rest is a slow-moving education for myself. As a Student, I do hope to learn life-lessons for myself and my family, even while I help others.

Life is beautiful.

Take Care Caretakers!

PS feel free to write me an update about how you are doing.

 

* 824 *

I've for so long enjoyed my memories of our tomorrow that I wonder -- need some day ever come? Will your lips kiss as soft as I remember, will you wake so gracefully as now I dream? You return to me again and again, a foretaste of our fate. Our rite is in our coupling, our proof is in our conversation.

You scratch your name in the oak of my heart. Let us never own much more than each other. Who can command whilst juggling? I am at least an expert of myself, and of you as well – hardly more. That much I will script faithfully: O my Golden Sun, O my Silvery Moon. You are as true as the wide blue sky, as cloistered and hidden as the cloud-cloaked stars.

* 825 *

Were I sick or dying, I would notice all these lovely little things usually invisible around us: the flashing splash of milk drops upon the surface of my coffee; the pour of the white into the depths of the darkness only to return in nebulous fractic clouds; the curious manner of the tree beyond the window, blown in the wind so the leaves shimmer in the sun, from dark and bended to green and straight, like glitter. Yet my secret is known, that I am bereft, for your diagnosis has been laid with a gavel: we must operate. I know it's a mere roadbump, but it intimates a certain truth: you will one day betray me for death, return to the earth, consign your ash in the Ganges, and your name to the ledger. Will you await me in the heaven I've shouldered over this my daily drudge? I've spun us an eternity, and we are knit at the pith, but you are such an impetuous beast, so eager to map edges, and surpass them in laughter. Stay put, oh spontaneous child! You quirky quark, stay put! Since Zeus split us, I've been aching return. Let Aristophanes laugh, but we fit, you and I, like Cinderella's slipper, like skin to flesh. Daily life is such a luxury, a richness of detail thicker than shag. Like the sick and the dying, like the vulnerable poet, I see in your face a fatal new sun. When we look upon each other you say, "Nothing is as real as this."

* 827 *

The range was a stage where everybody played the part assigned, and assigned each other parts, and addressed each other by their stage names alone, and this for so long, that one by one they forgot they had any other name at all. Then I crossed the field, and at times would drop an original name. A player would pause, look distracted, ask what I had said, and, when I repeated myself, would mutter quietly "Who are you?" not knowing, quite so well, which was the game and where the stage. I drifted, by and by, and by casual linkages, into a room of the Few, and sat promptly on the floor – just a bedroom for such a high office -- and smiled as they circled around me, asking me further instruction.

* 828 *

Men are more monstrous in their virtues than their vices. More horrors were committed in the name of Goodness and God than any crime committed under a banner (could there even be such a banner) of vice and corruption. Lincoln admired the religious fervor of the South, which exceeded that of the North. Most wars are fought for righteous reasons on both sides (or at least, these are the reasons the soldiers and the people are told to believe). Nobody fights for what they believe to be a lie, and yet the most persecuted religious movement in American history has been the Mormons, which outsiders sometimes mock as incredible. Certainly, their commitment to their faith is incredible, and the courage and ubiquity of their missions exceeds that of any other sect.

The Nazis really believed the Jews to be evil. So did the Just and Good Christians of the witches they burned. Believing this to be the case, should we not, in fact, commend them? They took their mission much more seriously than you or I and backed it with their lives. How easy for you to condemn them to hell when you have no skin in the game. What do you live and die for? The intensity of a terrorist is to lay his life down for the cause. In comparison, are you even alive? Yet we at last have this advantage – we regard no man as wicked and no group of men as evil.

The greatest crimes in history were done for the "right" reasons, under the banner of "righteousness." Yet those selfish capitalists building railroads across America did more good for us than all the charity workers of the time combined. Christianity with its masochistic cult of suicide has supplied the world with martyrs, but who actually lives the life? Is not religion a Way, and not a belief? What good does dying accomplish compared to living?

The Minority will lead, so long as they have the Majority of the will power. The critics, intellectuals, mockers, complainers, self-righteous, slogan-shouters come to nothing. Passion pure and furious wins the day.

As flame devours all it touches, and converts all to its own substance, so passion is irresistible. My lips lick your lobes in fiery thirst. I whisper your name.

 

 

-- R ᴤ88s Я --

Perfection Is Easy

www.perfectidius.com

AMA LAUGHS!

 

Update, Allays 819 - 825

Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:

Greetings!

This week has been better for me: my special-needs daughter has been more manageable, work more sufferable, life as a whole of a purer tonality. October brings the birthdays of my younger two.

I've been editing Madeye – my first novel, written in 2006 – at an even pace; most of my creative energy lately addresses this editing, with a few Allays, as those I've included, to balance me out. It will be a while before I have the stockpiled dynamite to begin a new project. The Allays took a lot out of me. I hope to write a myth cycle, finish the Emilegends, and one day write an epic with Ama as the backdrop. I know this is an age of tweets, not epics, but I am eager to find an ambition large enough to excite me.

Take care, Caretakers!

 

* 819 *

I read you as a prognosticator reads a goat's intestines or an augurer reads a bird's dance. I need no approval to know I have succeeded. Some of you bless me with a frown: that I offended you proves my achievement. Nor is it word-for-word and sign-for-sign, but I must read you subtly, for you do see things I do not, you see things you do not know you see, and I can see them finally in the way you look away, or sigh, or make a jest. You give yourself away, each and every time. It's not so much that I have to do a thing, I merely must prove to myself I could.

 

* 820 *

Pride is power. Cease to fret over nettles, drop distractions, or relationships that bleed your ego, and root yourself in your source.

 

* 821 *

In any romantic relationship, the invisible power dynamic is formative, the overarching emotional economy conformative. No grand romantic gesture will save a sinking marriage, but the emotional tones of caring, protecting, nurturing, and below that the material substrate, the doing of caring, the actual providing, the literal protecting, make the difference. Words aren't worth the paper they are printed on, unless the ink is blood and the paper skin. What matters is protection, nurturance, mutual support, a safe space to let your vulnerabilities show. The substances of libido and money are like oxygen and nutrients in the blood: they are for the system, not the system for them: food for the stomach, and the stomach for life.

The invisible power dynamic inspires romance, that burn with its twenty-year afterburn; emotions enclothe naked power. For woman no less than for man, sex and power comingle: each dominates in their own way.

 

 

 

* 822 *

From each according to his ambition; to each according to his contribution – with a minimum standard of living for the disabled and the dependents – children, and elderly; and a maximum standard of living for the affluent, for wealth is a limited good.

 

* 823 *

The wound is stronger for the hurt. Sacrifice is investment. Need is fatal – what we need will come to be. The exchange of substances, the give and take of meanings, makes for a solid relationship, the way each organ gives and takes within the organism. Habit is hard, a complexity of habits harder still. A man exudes a routine like a snail exudes a shell: we find uses, and we find official and occult meanings for all those around us. Were eros lacking, something will be eroticized to compensate. Lust is a reflex. And if we cursed lust by equating it with adultery, nevertheless, we will on some level, nevertheless, lust, were it as innocent as to bless the babes. Mysticism is a purified internalized eros. Where the outlet / inlet lacks, roles must be assigned. Were I the last man in the world, and you the last woman, we must stand for all the world to each other. In a way, it is already so for every couple, where the husband represents all men, the woman all women. We may call sex selfish, but it is the basis of selflessness, since we put ourselves at the mercy of the other. Selfishness and self-interest may be opposites, after all, since to sacrifice others for the self is to diminish the self. We need that reciprocation, that give and take, nor can we own a thing till we earn it.

 

* 824 *

I've for so long enjoyed my memories of our tomorrow that I wonder need some day ever come? Will your lips kiss as soft as I imagined, will you wake so gracefully as I dream? You return to me again and again, a foretaste of our fate.

You scratch your name in the oak of my heart. Let us never own much more than each other. Who can command while juggling? I am at last an expert about myself, and of you as well. That much I will script faithfully: O Golden Sun, O Silvery Moon – you are as true as the wide blue sky, and as cloistered and hidden as the stars cloaked in cloud.

 

* 825 *

Were I sick or dying, I would notice all these lovely little things, invisible around us: the flashing splash of milk drops upon the surface of coffee, the pour of the white into the depths of the darkness only to return in nebulous fractic clouds; the curious manner of the tree outside the window, blown in the wind so the trees shimmer in the sun, from dark and bended, to green and straight, like glitter over a painting. Yet my secret is known, that I am bereft, for your diagnosis has been laid with a gavel: we must operate. I know it's a mere roadbump, but intimates a certain truth: you will one day betray me for death, return to the earth, with your ash in the Ganges, your name on the ledger. Will you await me in the heaven I've shouldered over this daily drudge? I've spun as an eternity, and we are knit at the pith, but you are such an impetuous beast, so eager to map edges, surpass them in laughter. Stay put, oh spontaneous one. You quirky quark, stay put! When Zeus split us, I've been aching return. Let Aristophanes laugh, but we fit, you and I, like Cinderalla's slipper, like skin to flesh. Daily life is luxury, a richness of detail thicker than shag. Like the sick and the dying, I see a new sun.

 

-- R ᴤ88s Я --

Perfection Is Easy

www.perfectidius.com

AMA LAUGHS!

 

Update and Latest Allays

Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:

Greetings!

 

Life has been more of the same: struggling to keep my job despite struggling with major depression; managing my special needs daughter Natalie despite how difficult this is; trying to be a good husband, good father; and writing, as a self-therapy for all the previous stuff.

I've decided that ownership is discipline. The tax of parenting Natalie disciplines me, makes me more than I was. Every occupation is an education: if I can do well on this job for at least five years, I'm sure I will have learned as much as in four years of college. So I keep going and trying despite my self limitiations.

Here are the latest Allays!

 

Take care, Caretakers!

 

* 814 *

Poetry is possibility. The hard cold clamp of math, the frozen toe tripstones of science, which would, could it, speak only math, hopes to choke all connotation out of existence. Yet the letter lives. A man does well to cushion his days and relationships with suggestive ambiguities, investments, dissonances, and resonances which pay off when opportunistic moorings seek their sail.

Limber your lamb-soft talk in ways, days, and possibility -- the finale of seem, the double of dream. Be sure to double all your truths, to veil yourself in wonder. Prose frames a fair skeleton, but everything vascular rhymes.

Only a sense of could, a flirt of suggestion, keeps open the gate of maybe, the child's freedom of such it can be. We flirt with existence, and half our sense is nonsense, till at last we see and believe.

 

* 815 *

How did you find me, despite my disguise? Why did you ambush me when I lay hidden among the deaf and blind who can't at all recognize me? I've made sure of it, that nobody would see me for what I am. Boring, predictable, 'weird but harmless,' so I have deigned to seem. Yet you come on the scene with high congratulations as if you had a clue. Save it! Save it all! I don't care for your praise or bare recognitions. You speak as a man drunk, who feels unfettered enough to slur a few truths. I've worked too hard to crystallize my aspect. Harass me no more, I care not for your praise or flattery. Even Ama plies me with criticism, complaint, and every manner of critique. If I can so hypnotize her, in her earthly aspect, equally will I chain you down, once I learn your name and givings. I will be owned by no one, and so I fake my chains.

 

* 816 *

Beauty created the universe and beauty sustains it. We would conform to our age and our time, the motives and directives of our generation, yet when the innermost shines, time melts away. As Milton sang when he spoke through Satan, but wheezed when he spoke through God, so there is no faking inspiration: where there is fire, there you burn; where there is ash there you dim. So ask where a man or woman sings. What gives them fever? For fifteen years, my Niviana, and she alone could make me sing. How to escape her? Why can no other spring the tune? Love certainly is not a convenience. We sing as we must, not as we would. The themes of the times, the "inspiration" of monetary gain, mean nothing, say nothing, fade like the waves, which bow down, forgotten. Likewise, we may ride the tide, and ebb with the sea, yet that fountain heart, irrepressible, sets the tone of eternal youth. I can never escape you. My Self is a Will; I must submit to you, the allthing, the without-which-not. There is no god but God, and to each man this is his very Self, groom of Ama All.

 

* 817 *

Intuition: the fetus thinks. We develop our gift, our talent, our difference, our Name, our meaning, our purpose, our logic, our crea, our vocation, our logos, that eternal unique life, from the beginning, and ever after in all that we do.

Some outer forms correspond to the inner urge. If Socrates had a genius for definition testing, and Jesus for hyperbolic one-liners, so too do each of us have our difference which, if we attend it, expands as far as we care to take it. My Niviana has a genius for antithesis, and myself for combining divergences.

Editing is to make a work more like itself, self-similar, to develop the native genius within it. Bring out the best in everybody – their best, which will be unique and difficult to recognize, as all new things are.

Give, but just enough – never completely. Let your gifts irritate and provoke, let your truths shock and titillate, expose only glimpses, and save your greatest grace for Ama alone.

 

* 818 *

If falling in love gives you wings, frees the soul, whatever curlicued bit of prosy you prefer, know at least this: love is slavery. As power is freedom, love, therefore, as a submission to the beloved, as a trance to her beauty, also amounts to a sacrifice of power, and hence resentment. That love and hate so completely coexist so as to be simultaneous aspects of the same – one felt consciously, the other unconsciously – is evidenced by the wrath, fury, resentment, and thirst for revenge freed during divorce proceedings. No new emotion erupts during a breakup, but the repressed underside of love itself, the resentment at sacrifice and submission to the beloved, her expectations and demands. Hate is the obverse of love, and its unconscious support: we love her under these conditions, and in this way – set the terms, coach the codicils – but should she forsake them, then our righteous fury erupts. In no other relationship are we so vulnerable as in love; in no other relationship can we be hurt so intimately and irreparably as in love. It offers us our highest highs and our lowest lows. Cupid abused Zeus blamelessly and without punishment. Thus we are all done in by this prankster son.  I know of nothing more evil, and innocently evil, than love. Power at least commands respect with its dignity. Love undoes us all.

 

-- R ᴤ88s Я --

Perfection Is Easy

www.perfectidius.com

AMA LAUGHS!

 

update and allays 805 - 813

 

Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:

Greetings!

Lately life has been more and more of the same: Natalie, my special needs 11-year-old has been a challenge; Theron and Emilie are learning more every day, it is an education watching them create personalities out of themselves. The job as a peer support specialist at Pine Rest also remains an education, and I suspect that after five years of it I will have learned something I could not have otherwise. Instead of writing, I've been busy editing my first novel, Madeye, which I will publish once I am finished.

Take care, Caretakers!

 

* 805 *

Ah, to be nonchalant in the face of certain destruction! We only lose the Game when we take it too seriously.

Ama laughs! Oh, how Mirror Meditation cheers any infamy. You stained my dagger with your blood, and absorbed my mind in the menstruum of your discourse.

Mother Life is Mother Death. Having forged our heterocosm, we will find Her there.

 

* 806 *

Eru fell into a swoon when napping by an underground fountain. A Dreamweaver sank into his head and filled his mind with fevered dreams of ecstasies, mysteries, and such bliss as he had rarely discovered in waking life.

He awoke the next day and promptly forgot his romp. The next night the dreams returned. Enraptured and enchanted, he lay in bed, and only woke up fitfully, and after much persuasion.

Soon, Eru slept at every free moment, and gave his charms and loving regard to the Dreamweaver. As God of Rhythm, the seasons fell out of tune, summer lingered into fall, and day strayed into night, nor was the animal kingdom regulating itself, and chaos seemed to be the order of the day.

Ovath knew what he had to do. The stern Allfather approached his son's home, and, when given no entrance, let himself in. Eru slept fitfully, and demanded his father go away. Ovath took his pillow, his blanket, but Eru would only grunt and not so much as open an eye.

Ovath recited Eru's responsibilities and duties, cataloging the disasters his absence had caused. Eru shrugged in his sleep.

Nonplussed, Ovath opened his mouth and began odling. The song produced such a god-awful din that Eru's spell finally broke, and the dreamy-eyed upstart yawned and said "Ugh."

Ovath departed, and let the chagrined Eru regain his Rhythm.

 

* 807 *

My heart virtue, Independence, grew from my blessed curse of difference: I found myself different from others and at first lamented and later celebrated. This relates to the virtue of Self Reliance, which Emerson presented as the fountainmouth of all virtues, that upon which every virtue necessarily depends. His essays, which present the opposite of a democratic free for all, but instead a carefully balanced tissue of doctrines, epitomized in the essay specifically about the subject, and explicated in every other, do not so much define Self Reliance, for though truths are definable, the Truth is indefinable; they give its various senses. We come into the same experience as the giver of Truth, and then, without proofs or arguments, we know the Way. So I strive in these allays, which you must at times nimbly skit across like a goat upon a mountain's crag, not to gain the expected "Aha!" epiphany, but a deeper sense, first of all, down in the dark of night when alone amidst the intimate starts of your dream life. I set a tonality, not in the words and their cadence, but between the blanks and amidst the in-between places. What is best in my writing, what is best in me, is not quotable and illustratable. Neither this nor that, or, perhaps, yes, both this and that, and also the other, the ineffable, which, like a contract, imprints but a skit of ink, but means, in the end, your life.

 

* 808 *

My, this shy of reddened cheek! How deep do today's humiliations sink? I am shamed and speechless. These narcissistic wounds will knit and scar. Ama! Heaven help this raw stark naked break of a pride-tried heart. Where to bury my shame? What, but to bare my aching heart to you, to open my neck and let you kiss my wounds. I do bleed, silently, alone, struggling in ways others don't, trudging through mires nobody else felt. If heaven is made of ratios, I must celebrate modest gains as exhaustively bought. What a glare of muddle, this wrinkled brow. Austere yourself! Meet your gaze. Hold your own. You yet will win.

 

* 809 *

"The unconscious is structured like a language"? Mind is experience, meaning, interpretation, language – and the images, or nonlinguistic concepts and ideas, the I of the eyes, require interpretation for translation, to convert from experience to language. Civilization is this clash of ideas – their competition and cooperation. Magic in itself does not command nature, but it does command that part of nature that we so eagerly wish to command: other men and women. Words control words, convert experiences into meanings and interpretations, and allow us to express those meanings to others. We each generate formulas, jokes, names and nicknames, to structure the meanings of the mind. Language structures meaning. A gesture contains an idea; a smirk is enough to keep a potent idea at bay.

In this way, we internalize our civilization, and then walk through the "artifacts," that is, its material aspect, while not yet contacting parts, by, perhaps, holding a sacred idea free from us as a joke – for most of what is called sacred is poison to all but the parishioner.

 

* 810 *

Belief is God. That we have a theology, robust and thorough, the brainchild of generations of sincere and not-so-sincere thinkers, is God enough – fulfills all the uses we need for God.

 

 

* 811 *

Marriage is a conversation. Would you marry well, marry a person you can really talk with. Different meanings for different friends, but of the One, endless intercourse. It so happens that every relationship requires a certain distance, and the roommate loses spiritual intimacy as the long-distance relationship loses physical intimacy. Every relationship at every moment holds its ideal distance. We cramp till we find this. Much of socializing is finding the best distance or intimacy for each person we meet.

 

* 812 *

Ah! The rank and dignity of the great broad blank! The appalling white of abject atheism, the great all-consuming white of pure being! The scrubbed table, the shined mirror, the chored house, the austere check book.

At first pass I made the most obvious alterations. Of 100,000 I took it down to 10,000. With every pass, a subtler touch, a finer detail, till the garlic was chopped to slivers, the spice ground to powder. Finer and finer my editor's mark twined, making as a cape and cover the great bright blank of utter perfection to shine through all my speech, the spokes of the world wheel.

 

* 813 *

Only a cynic would judge a man's life in terms of his worst moments, as if his mistakes reveal the Truth about him. Yet again, what we do despite social conformity bespeaks a private necessity, and our Necessity cores us. Which is it? What is the key to a man's soul? His prides or his shames? Or perhaps his everyday life, the great average? Isn't every day a euphemism and every thought a rationalization? What is the Truth of man? Is it what he chose or what he could not at all avoid choosing, so much was it a part of him? How shall we write a biography? Aren't all biographies fictions "based on actual events"?

A man is a thing, is many things, is a story, is many stories, and, if given enough attention, rewards endless study and competing interpretations. Our great figures tell us the most. Folks like Socrates, Jesus, Confucius, and Siddhartha we know little about, mostly legendary and mythical encrustations. Yet even apocrypha or legends about a man can reveal more truth than historical facts. Facts obscure the truth, and only a great fiction reveals the Truth of a thing.

Certainly a man's tendencies, his character of various habits, mask themselves in a compensatory balance, so that cruelties get a reasonable expression, generosities get a reasonable expression. Most of attitude, or incipient action, can be detected through a personality of words, but some ideas, memories, and opinions may be vulnerabilities, publicly blamable, and so they act behind the scenes, invisible agents – so that for good or bad, we can only catch them off guard, either by inference or through embarrassment.

Most of our strategies must be unknown to be effective. Our eulogistic coverings and public rationalizations keep our desires and intentions under the radar, and we may rightly say that much of virtue is to pay for vice. Yet virtue gets its energy from vice, and would be impossible without it. What best exposes the attitude, belief, personality, and character of the man – his feelings, thoughts, words, and behaviors, may not be averages, tendencies, and statistical norms. Strategic moments expose the logic of the whole. Like recognizes like, and a true biographer is not quite an autobiographer, but discovers himself through this other.

 

 

-- R ᴤ88s Я --

Perfection Is Easy

www.perfectidius.com

AMA LAUGHS!