thanksgiving update, and allays 852 - 861

Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:

Greetings!

 

Today, America celebrates her Gratitude Feast, Thanksgiving, thanking providence for providing America to the pilgrims, and, insofar as the Native Americans can be grateful for having taken the land from the original original Native Americans (a few waves back), they can be grateful too. One Manifest Destiny later and we created a dynamic, self-contradictory, revolutionary republic, continually self-overcoming and redefining myself.

 

I am grateful for Ama, who speaks to me in the depths of the my night, and chases the shadows from my heart and brushes the cobwebs from my mind; I am thankful for my children, we keep me to my tasks and duties.

 

What I've noticed in this small clutch of allays is how persistent a few dominant figures have been in my education: Emerson, Nietzsche, and Jesus – I often refer to each of them, moving in and out of the allays. Whitman isn't far behind, and Kenneth Burke silently and invisibly adds his touches.

 

Take care, Caretakers!

 

 

* 852 *

As the world's oldest story, the Epic of Gilgamesh, demonstrates, the instinct for immortality has haunted us from the start, and has in its way given birth to all the world's religions. The instinct for immortality fulfills itself through having children, creating art ("Life is short, art is long"), contributing to a group that outlives us ("dying for the cause"), and, of course, in fantasizing visions of continued life on earth (reincarnation, resurrection) or in heaven.

The instinct for immortality may be the life instinct itself, yet the sexual instincts relate deeply to it, this giving up of self into children. The masculine will-to-power finds its correlate in the famous maternal instinct, which aims to create and nurture children, and to infantilize the adult partner by using the same gestures and methods. Love and power comprise the social goods.

 

* 853 *

"It is not suffering we object to so much as meaningless suffering," explained Nietzsche. "Once we find a meaning for our suffering, we can even will to suffer more." Certainly, an unfortunate fact can turn into its opposite, as when the early fans of Jesus faced a crucified rabbi. They invented a meaning for it, and thus the defeat became a sort of triumph. The trope was taken from the prototypical martyr, Socrates, willing to die for philosophy – though Plato and Aristotle needn't repeat his gesture. For Paul, Jesus' death mattered much more than his life – he isn't once quoted, not a parable, nor a quip, and anything like a human personality has been completely emptied out. There are no unfortunate facts. Everything can be used – where there is a will there is a way.

We trust our guts, and reach down to the Aboriginal Self in our reflection, and in this snip the lines of overdetermination that history and circumstance weave around us. Reflecting on the Self escapes time and space to that utopic point, the beginning of time, where at last we are free.

 

 

 

* 854 *

"The end of the world is nigh!" they've said for millennia, and they say it today. "Oh, the times we live in!" How they fret and pray their secular prayers. They do not see the universe is moral, that Justice tends everything. Had they witnessed this fact, they would worry much less.

Religious and political factions have been plotting the end of the world from the beginning, as a sort of ultimate gesture. Birth and death are mysteries. The birth and death of mankind are likewise mysteries. And where there is an unknown, pretense prevails.

 

* 855 *

My taste is the opposite of a tolerant taste, and most of what others love leaves me cold and unimpressed. I am difficult to impress, yet so eager to be. Yet, what I love I love with my whole heart; when I find a love worthy of sacrifice, then I sacrifice gratefully. Ama, you are my all in all; I never despair when you are near.

I preserve my innocence through a heavy contempt and cynicism of all the timely issues that electrify the world and its media. Saved by a laugh, I mock at all the fads and fashionable ideas, the great, oh-so-great topics on the table at the moment. Ultimately, time is boring and eternity fascinating. What is eternal in the new is all that matters.

 

* 856 *

There is much that is lovely in each of us, much deserving of love, yet not everybody can appraise this, few can see our deepest beauty, for it takes beauty to see beauty, and what is easily loved and by everybody requires little beauty to see, for it is obvious, and what is rare and profound and divine requires the rare and profound and divine to apprehend, and thus the one who can love deeper gains a mystical reverie.

 

* 857 *

Blessed are the poor? "Poverty is a sin," my Niviana claims, and pooh-poohs my systematic indolence. "Will I be loved as I would be loved?" we hopelessly pine, and settle for what we get. We must contend against the Amazons before we can marry one: you know a truth by attacking it. It is the Poet's to Name, a poet is a namer, and Ama we have named each other in folds and folds. Yes, the wealthy, the rich in spirit, rich in imagination, in creativity, in verve, justify life and make it wholesome for all. Exuberance is the ultimate generosity. Blessed are the rich in spirit.

 

 

* 858 *

"When Jesus is mentioned, men forget their knowledge and accept the apparatus of prophesy, miracle, positive supernatural indication by name and place and claim on this part to extraordinary outward relations; -- all these, which are the prismatic hues and lights which play around any wonderful genius, they regard as of an adamantine reality, and in the select society where Beauty, Goodness, and the Soul are named, these men talk of 'preaching Christ,' and 'Christ's being the ideal of Man,' so that I told them it might become my duty to spit in the face of Christ as a sacred act of duty to the Soul, an act which that benighted pilgrim in nature would well enough appreciate."

So says the Sage, which reminds me of that maxim, "If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha." These cult figures get exaggerated beyond recognition, and yet I recommend you face yourself in the mirror, then look upon heaven, close your eyes, and let the Utter Divine speak to you unmediated by any man.

 

* 859*

We learn our mother tongue during a window of youth: second tongues come with an accent. Likewise, the first time we fall in love, we learn the cadence of love, the language; the first time we experience the divine, whatever tradition or religion, we speak those terms and tropes, the sacred language, naturally, without an accent (or if accepted, an accent common to our people). For every language in the world, there is a corresponding accent when they learn English – so many stereotypical distortions. Likewise, a Christian who converts to Buddhism as an adult will have a Christian accent; a Catholic who converts to atheism speaks differently than a Protestant who does so; our first experience marks us for life. This is why there is such a fight to secure the "innocence" of the young. Every extant ideology hopes to impress them while they are impressionable.

 

* 860 *

The Holiday, usurped, as were many other tropes, from the Mithras cult, continued its gift-giving tradition under these terms: we give on Christmas because God gave his Son to us, and the wise men gave gifts to infant Jesus to honor the new King. So let us give ourselves to the world as incarnations of the All, of Ama, and let us give gifts to others to honor their divinity. Of course there is a spiritual giving; those of wealth can gladly give wealth, but those of other means will do well to give from their own riches: let the poet give a poem, let the singer sing a song, let the charitable give charity, and let the penniless give their bare presence.

 

* 861 *

Our life-narrative on any given day resorts so often to a synecdoche or metonymy of our current preoccupation – "How's life? Well, my car just broke down today" – and indeed, a moment can last all day if we dwell. What at this moment defines your life, gives it meaning, what does this part of your life stand for? Something now in today's terms, and, in tomorrow's terms, looking back, probably something else. What we talk about, think about, feel about, act upon, this is our life, the whole of our life. Know, therefore, how to insist your mind upon a few solvable challenges and ignore unsolvable distractions. What is the dominant fact at any given moment? What concerns us, what do we care about? We have some choice in this.

 

-- R ᴤ88s Я --

Perfection Is Easy

www.perfectidius.com

AMA LAUGHS!

 

 

Update, Allays 840 - 849

Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:

Greetings!

Well today it happened; I got the first nip of that frostbit bug the nip of Christmas. As this entire season pivots on a day, and that, the shortest of the year, a stop to pause on meaning of it all.

The Holiday, usurped, as were many other tropes, from the Mithras cult, continued the gift giving nature of it under these terms: we give on Christmas because God gave his Son to us, and the wise men gave gifts to infant Jesus to honor the new King. So let us give ourselves to the world as incarnations of the All, of Ama, and let us give gifts to others to honor their divinity. Of course there is a spiritual giving; those of wealth can gladly give wealth, but those of other means will do well to give from their own riches: let the poet give a poem, let the singer sing a song, let the charitable give charity and let the penniless give their bare presence.

Take care, Caretakers!

 

* 840 *

In a relationship, what a fight is about is never what it's really about. It's always about one of two things, respect or love. To amplify the terms takes us on a journey of all we call motivating in human behavior. Most couples don't know why they fight half the time. Daily life is a theater of seem, while the inner maturation evolves and transcends. We wake up one morning and surprise to find ourselves suddenly wise.

 

 

* 841 *

Deep at the core of each of us shines our Uncreated Deathless Self, which sheds creative light upon all the universe. We exist to unfold that flower, and everything we accomplish and don't in this life reverberates and amplifies through the spiral unto eternity. What a man or woman thinks to offer or prides in may, like the  stag's love for his horns, prove his downfall when he ran from the hunters' dogs and got stuck in the thicket, whereas the legs he blamed as feeble would have been his salvation; so our deepest gift may not be the showy one. It may be the hidden light, difficult to behold, few in friends, and therefore all the more worthy and precious.

 

* 842 *

Our body decides before reason: every gesture and blink accumulates constellations of meaning, till we make a conversion, till we choose an idea, a person, a cause, to fall in love, to assume the mantle. First, we fall in love, then, we see her beauty; first, we choose a cause, then, we see its evidence. Reason is an afterfact, a pruning tool for dental work, to cleanse our capacity of doubt, our teeth, against counterevidence and for friendly evidence. The choice precedes the reason. Our body decides, and so much of our full experience contributes, with daily increase, little button clicks and lever switches, ever and always, always and ever. The spontaneous choice marks the work of a lifetime.

 

* 843 *

The body is memory, remembers all our deeds and words, contains its full past in the skin of the present. Our full body of influence is in the full difference our existence has made upon the world – an infinite sum, and infinite reaching. Not only our brain remembers, but every scratch on the ground remembers us, thinks us, recites our name. The full constellation of changes we've made to the world become our resurrected body after we pass our immediate skin. Thus the eternal return of the same amounts to the widening spiral that begins with our initial difference, and the difference it makes for the universe.

 

* 844 *

Were your sense of smell magnified a hundred fold, you might not enjoy your friends so much, nor they you. Wisdom is knowing when to overlook.

 

* 845 *

What is fashionably called "New Atheism" at the moment seeks to establish itself as a durable, reproducible, practical set of beliefs able to instantiate a worldview and a correspondence lifeway – as all balanced religions and philosophies do. Since, per its name, it exists as the negation of something extant – namely, theism – the morality of New Atheism is a morality of the gaps. Wherever the Christian morality fails or seems to fail, in popular sentiment, New Atheism markets itself as the reasonable alternative. In this, they are much like the Native American philosophies which emphasize their ecological conscience when selling their viewpoints alongside the much rationalized, much overly-rationalized philosophies of Christianity and Catholicism. Atheism is the shadow of God.

 

* 846 *

The world is cruel. Every joke has its butt, and what makes us smile like the envy of our friends and enemies? Our entertainment is in gunfights, torture, execution; our romantic relationships end in heartbreak and humiliation; our life in sickness and death. Life feeds on life, what we eat must suffer and die; entire species are devoted to living within one another, feeding off each other's loss. We are cruel to cruelty: our hate turns against itself, or otherwise we would have no objection against it. Yet, guilt is merely violence turned inwards, and blame and self-blame are so many modes of sadomasochism. Pity is cruelty with a good conscience; righteous indignation is an excuse to be cruel. We enjoy another's pain so long as it is farmed as a villain's come-uppance. How to escape the suffering? Indeed, what of our instincts, our life, wants to escape it? Only when we come to see life as the Game and living as play can we atone ourselves with existence.

 

 

* 847 *

We've always ventriloquised the Absolute, the God-term of whatever our system, so that priests can condemn and apprise mankind through the rhetorical figure of a God, or atheists by a cosmic eye looking upon the earth as an unimportant speck, or, in our fear of machines, as if a computer would see the truth of mankind, and replace us: every fiction projects our personal views, the way the guilt of the paranoid is projected on a government out to get them. Claustrophobic in our Cave, this skull of shadows, we escape, cast our glance at the sun, and seek the voice of authority.

If whites are the most solitary culture, the most given to austere solitude, or time with God, it is no wonder they are the most terrible and awe-inspiring. God is solitude. Stand alone, regard your own portion, insist on yourself. Perhaps they are cold, perhaps they are hard – lone wolves, world conquerors. Mencken, in his usual manner, characterized them as the most cowardly, and perhaps they are the most familiar with fear – white-as-a-sheet from fear – but the cold climate of their roots, the terrible elements that marked their environment, gave them an iron clasp of power over themselves. This is why they stand as Universal, they lack particular ethnicity.

You call me West Walker, O my Ama, luster after the setting sun. Perhaps you are correct. If in these allays I stray belligerent against this religion or that, this country or that, whatever group I define myself against, I hold it as a necessary fiction for giving myself room to grow.

 

* 848 *

Memories are repeatable experiences. We know experiences can repeat identically because, even if we compare them as different, they must be referenced to a repeated same. Repetition is meaning. Memories are the first meanings, assumptions the second. Assumptions abstract from memories.

 

* 849 *

"Nonbinary" is a one word oxymoron.

 

 

-- R ᴤ88s Я --

Perfection Is Easy

www.perfectidius.com

AMA LAUGHS!

 

Update, Allays 829 - 839

 

Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:

Greetings!

 

As I've oft told you, I've been editing my first novel, Madeye (2006), and once I've given it its final rinse and press, I will gather up a large cloud of my various books and blitzkrieg the market: I figure if anything at all sticks, that will be my inlet. After all, it takes just a fissure to let the moisture in that undoes the stone; likewise, the fungus disperses its spores so immensely that few are the places a slice of bread can sit out unmolded.

Natalie remains a struggle; the job remains a struggle; the marriage remains a struggle: they are three struggles that are also educations, which I push back into the mantel of my self-education, bringing what lessons I can from my daily humiliations.

 

Take Care, Caretakers!

 

 

 

* 829 *

If you see two, know there is only the One. Every duality is reflection. The upsetting triad breaks a unity into a progression, a stream into a deltic transformation. The four again collapses into twos and One. Five is power.

 

* 830 *

If I laugh a bit, I enforce my distance. It is not mine to drown in you; it is mine to burn. I am the phoenix, made for flame, the craving and satiation of passionate bliss. You are the Ocean, I very well know, so let me laugh a bit, as with a cruel joke, mocking at tragedy, for I will not be drowned in pity. I would rather be cruel than surrender. Endless moralizations will not absorb me: my innermost virtue is Independence. I flee forever from you. I would rather be evil than owned. Ama, I yet follow you through heaven and hell and love you always. What is this but our dance -- resistance and submission, escape and pursuit?

 

* 831 *

I like the fresh look upon the face of somebody I caught off guard. They glance at me with a startle, before they decide how to react. In that first knee-jerk reaction, perhaps a hint reveals itself? I've had those who, due to our official relationship, kept things polite, only to later expose their hatred for me. A few secretly loved me and never fessed. I guess I somehow knew? How is it I meanwhile am so obvious to everybody always?

 

* 832 *

If I speak the truth, they say they do not hear. If I shine my light, they say they do not see. If I reveal my heart, they say they don't believe. Yet they do. They harden their hearts against me, but through a chink in a crack in a crevice my light gets through.

 

* 833 *

Conscious conspiracies are relatively rare, but unconscious conspiracies are the norm everywhere. Every group, sex, and race conspires against the others, all the others, in covert, ingenious, let us say even daemoniac subtlety, and our participation may be so disavowed and hidden that, when faced with an outright expression of the same, we are horrified and oppose it. Talk of world conspiracies bespeaks paranoia, but paranoia is justified, they all really are out to get you, in some sense. As we each belong to various groups, some by choice, some by birth – I'm an American, a male, was raised a Christian, am of German stock, and each of you has your own list -- we are consciously and unconsciously loyal to our various identies and willing to sacrifice for them. We know and are known by subliminal signs, invisible gestures, and secret handshakes -- only this we fail to see.

 

* 834 *

Anxiety is the inner, stress the outer, the tensions that situate us within our worlds. Coping with, managing, and accepting our dominant positions requires wisdom, and the playing of placehood – making the most of a difficult situation. The stresses inherent in our world as an endless clash of cultures, a war of all against all, spiritual warfare, with some material warfare mixed in, internalize into all of us as our principles battle for dominance. That is life from one aspect; true enough for what it states, but incomplete, in and of itself.

All religions state chaos came first. Perhaps Order came first: Mattria reflecting on Ama. That one which is two which is everything – her body is our world of tensions. To escape the game, to escape all situations, is to atone with the None. This is the act of suicide, euphemistically called Nirvana or Peace.

In this life, tension and stress characterize our days. Our necessity expands to the edges of the universe, our spiral clasps all and more. Our wounds bring us bliss.

 

* 835 *

In poetry, repetition is the norm, and disrupted repetition means something; in prose, irregularity is the norm, and repetition means something. Our days rhyme, with habits and routines that reduce whole seasons to a single day. A difference in routine means something, transfers energy into different directions.

The conjunctions of pleasure in the day keep the prose flowing – lapping tea, swigging coffee, having a shot of alcohol, something sweet, a half an hour mirror meditating, all these manage the progression of meaning through time, make life liveable, predictable, endurable, comfortable, fun.

Ultimately, our being and becoming are from our needs, our core. Habits add a rhythmic to the needs, and yet if the routine doesn't answer their flow outwards, from need to fulfillment, we suffer.

So many diseases share symptoms together that a discerning doctor must make subtle distinctions. So with the depressions, anxieties, boredoms, and perplexities of our days. What is needed may not immediately manifest to our imagination. Fantasy helps.

 

* 836 *

Novices see the war as black and white, their side obviously right, the opponent so obviously wrong they must be evil to deny it. A master has proper respect for his opponent. Children make the most noise about super-villains, but adults respect a worthy adversary, and learn from their opponents.

 

* 837 *

Winners believe in necessity, losers resort to chance. "How is it the powerful have imprinted the world with their language; our faith with their creeds, our schools with their math, science, poetry; our economy with their capitalism? How is it the powerful became powerful? Surely, by theft, and theft from us. Yet they preach equality, let us approach them on this ground." This is the strategy of the weaker, and for what it's worth it's clearly effective. Yet we all must continue to hive our genius into art, to pass the fire of fires down to our children and their children. There is no disputing taste? But all the world is a dispute over taste. That I insist on my Truth, my Way, my Tradition bespeaks my Self-reliance and Self-expression. Honor your source. Drink from your roots. All your ancestors toiled to provide you with the tools and weapons to approach your world. Gratefully take them, and add more of your own.

 

* 838 *

We each live in multiple situations at once. We have various identities -- gender, sexuality, religion, race, class, education, occupation -- and various allegiences -- to family, church, friends, culture. These energy fields orient our eyes to certain facts and away from others. A fact is meaningless in and of itself, only interpretations have meaning. So while we live in various situations, those situations cross each other out or intensify one another, so there are vacuums, quiet spots, trigger points, violence or peace. Like waves, troughs can cancel or intensify each other.

So an African American lives in a complex of situations, with clusters, statistical norms, stereotypes, and outlier behavior, untypical, unpredictable. Amidst his identities and ties, there may be a conflict between his race allegience, his religious allegience, his political allegience, and his allegiances to his parents. Where they are all in sync, the motivation is intense. Where they cancel each other out, there festers ambiguity, stress, and doubt.

 

* 839 *

I can talk for a glance. Shivers of you throughout my day restore me to my own. I'm hopeless in my swamp and drowning, but then you skate down a moonbeam and cheer me up, keep to my task to seek my goal at all costs. My life orbits the One. When I am able to shrug off the arrows from my flank, I will feel the better for it. I collect these piercing arrows from my flesh and fire them back again.

 

-- R ᴤ88s Я --

Perfection Is Easy

www.perfectidius.com

AMA LAUGHS!