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
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