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!
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