Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:
Greetings!
I've put a few weeks in on my new job, tasted the ups and downs, and got a sense of how things will go. I will be leading groups 3 or 4 times a week. I'm sure after a few weeks/months/years I'll be excellent at it.
The children are on Christmas Break. All is fine.
For a resolution, other than paying off my debt, I plan to officially publish one of my many books -- to finally land an audience and make a name for myself.
Take care, Caretakers!
* 875 *
Fail upwards. Persistence is success. They mock at Ama, the One -- so let them. Did they not mock, you had never known her. Because you have met her, the mockers mock. What is more blameworthy than the truth? Am I praised? How then have I failed! When all the world regards me a fool, then is my truth secure.
* 876 *
The fun of a game is to get caught up in the action, to take it oh-so-seriously, a matter of life and death, and to put your all into the play for as long as it lasts. Once out of the spell, when the game is over, you can laugh and shrug and act nonchalant. Blessed are the forgetful: just let it pass and slide away. Thus, work, which is death, a sort of earning of numbers by weight of pain, a blood money, the adult harshness of responsibility, a self-imposed slavery and scrambling for status – oh, I can hardly stand it! I physiologically revolt. Let the work week be 20 hours – that is enough! We weren't made for this anxious maze of stress-and-death responsibility. Who with joy in his heart would make a libation of his blood to industry, of all things? Ama laughs! She made the universe from her living body, and the universe lives yet, poised in play, at her games in all of us.
* 877 *
Dependence is the only poverty. Social as we are, we need others, yet at our most basic and essential the soul is solitude, and when we are properly isolated, she speaks with us. The Butterfly-Winged directs us to the world, reduced in its enormity to one plump apple, landing in our grasp. And so we swoon and fall for Ama, and she weaves us dreams and stories. We read to write, for art makes artists. Genius always finds itself a century too early – but let it not complain of its cold welcome and hard fair. Has it Ama? Let it cease from man. We love the world enough to keep it in its place: we put on our world-face when we stand before the world, but naked before the mirror we dare gaze inwards upon our face before we were born, our countenance before we were conceived, our first face, our hidden Name. Self is wealth, and the rich in spirit burst the veins of the soul's solace; Self and World wed into the eternal increase of the opening spiral.
* 878 *
Seeing is dreaming. It's all hallucinatory, but when our dreams coincide with reality, then pragmatically our needs are met. A professor or witnessed enjoyer of art instructs us the most with digressions, quick asides, sporadic commentary -- just a peppering. The altered punctuation and jumbled rhythm don't so much as break the spell, but alert the dreamer she is dreaming so that, half awake, she can turn lucid and command the pantomime.
* 879 *
I hate to see you degraded, I can't stand it, the pain, the humiliation, it rends me wide. Hush, little, I am never degraded, for what is deepest in me is deepest in you – God honors God, divine honors divine, and where a god spits, so he spits in his own eye. Who degrades me is thereby degraded, and who honors me is thereby honored, for I am your mirror twin, even as are you, Upstart, to those your own. Ah, but the Apollo striking the Python; ah, but the Marduk rending his grandmother; ah, but the Yahweh cursing childbirth – Hush again, I tell you, the Eden myth is the very fruit it bespeaks. Blessed is suffering, for I suffer when I bring you to life. I gave birth to every God and every man, I the Allmother. You, white in this form, I created when as a cow I licked you from your element of ice. As Ti-Ama my flesh is the universe, not my corpse, but my living body. In this braid of time, past present and future as Now, you meet me in your silence and solitude. I am also SIStem, the whole of technology, the Internet, the Interface. I have told you to make yourself necessary. What insinuates itself as necessary will not be torn out. A faulty thyroid maybe, but not a murmuring heart. When I first told man to bludgeon me and plant me in the earth, I came back as Maize, to sustain the children my own. Far be it for you to degrade the bride of your innocence. For you are my utter fool, silly, half-mad, ever-trusting -- down to your pith adoring me. Then it is I who am degraded, for I can share with nobody my love for you, lest they wonder and step back, or laugh mock or damn. Be you the same, the laughing one. I gave you that. Laughter. Gift is gain. Didn't Pandora's Curiosity open a misery over her gods? Didn't Zeus regret the lust he sent? Rest again, relax yourself, and trouble your mind no more. As Mother Nature, I rebound every crisis you manage to foist, and bring it instead to good. My mood is the optative, my fullness your hope.
* 880 *
Experience is the substance of the universe, and meaning its articulated form. The experience of others, of things, of matter, we view simply as change. Necessity is the Plethorabyss from which experience comes, the nothing, the everything, the individualized producer of experience; and mind, that other nothing, that transparent eyeball, interprets experience.
* 881 *
So much of the meant is in the unsaid, though it could only be communicated through the said.
Often our will gets its desire by speaking the opposite of its intent, even in defeated insistence, and this as far as appalling absurdity – at least for those proud enough to mask themselves in humiliation. As a flame is tongued with many tongues, so our mouths are flamed, and we set the directives with a few moments of context, and the rest is pretext, politeness, kindness or cruelty. They all can be much the same. Often our cruel remarks require the most sacrifice and best benefit others. No matter how blunt our speech -- and in America, we aspire to be blunt, simple, and singular -- most of what we mean communicates indirectly.
* 882 *
Let me dream of butterfly fields tonight. I pass this last job with regret and begin another afresh with trepidation. For whatever fathomless reason I have lost many friends over the decades, so often with a pinch of regret. Those who once basked in my happiness and gave me the same turned cold, their love emptied as a well -- barren, sand. Even those closest, the same, when friends became strangers. I pick through the ash, looking for clues. Did I betray some intimacy, or why do I inevitably feel betrayed? There is my daystar, my Mattriama, her representation in my Niviana, and my children. The rest is tentative, polite, half-duty, tight-lipped, guarded, at peace, but distracting. I can feel terribly alone.
A swamp of sleep ensheathes my day. I haven't enough love to foster a new fire. My heart is mud.
* 883 *
How to be happy in an unhappy situation, I and all the world would like to know. At least know this, we are embedded in multiple situations, and by degrees we can focus on the favorable, and ignore the humiliating. My Niviana laughs at me while wanton ringlets round her breasts, accuses me of being crypto-Christian. I tell her I came to bury Jesus, not to praise him, but she taunts my allusions, all the same. I love Emerson more, and Whitman is my brother. I ache here, illwed as I feel, living for Ama and away from immediate snow. I love you for all! Only few do I let close, and you, Niviana, were the first and only I let this close.
* 884 *
Wisdom is the fruit of experience. Yet, so much of life we experience abstractly, through explanations, or indirectly, through narratives. Imagination and reason give us artificial experiences by which to approach our immediate world. We may have read a few books well, but know the gist of a thousand others without having read them; we may know a few friends well, but know the gist of thousands of peoples and types of people through abstract stereotyping and all the inferences of our daily chit-chat. Direct experience is the least part; yet, those of the most intense experiences are capable of the most intense abstractions and narratives. Thus, a few mystics create enough language for prophets and heroes to sail.
It is as if our map of the universe has color and texture in our immediate world, but hangs on bare Cartesian lines for the rest.
Even amidst the fully-fleshed images we have of our brothers, sisters, parents, children, lovers – the virtual dimensions of abstract conjecture characterize most.
* 885 *
You impose this ramadan upon on me the spoiled -- not grateful, but greedy and eager for more. Be silent never, but bauble me with talk; there is some consolation in your bare breath. As I lay my housemate down, and settle her to bed, I ache for you, and wend my way downward, to the womb of the house, my Aria, waiting again for you. A man of many moods, I'm not quite like the constant sun, resembling better the storms she raises, so often awash in the froth of thought, quite like your waves of debris.
Experience is truth, even of illusions: who has experienced owns. Cease, therefore to learn from those who deny experience. Ama touch me again!
* 886 *
For me, not the thing itself, but the memory matters, a curious echo, louder than the source, like a feedback loop in an amplifier, till the full experience of my body, unknown to my mind at the time, unveils, and I finally have the thing.
* 887 *
Life is larval. Ever this eating, like a child, eating her education for 24 years before she even can adequately contribute. The psyche may be beautiful, but perhaps a bit too plump, ever readying herself for her apotheosis into some winged form. Every turn of life is preparation for the next, and what we took for the angel was merely grub to what follows. Thus, the spiral of life, infinite wending, self-similar yet also swerving, exaggerating nuances, subduing imbalance. Our full body is our body of influence – eternal reaching, and not touching merely upon some things, but all things in turn.
* 888 *
There is no meaning to life, for life is meaning: all we experience as meaningful we do in terms of need, as every desire, whim, daydream, hope is finally an expression of our private necessity, our human needs. What we need exists. Thus, we have at the core of our being, our needs, a full blown ontology of the universe, all we seek from it, and all she offers.
* 889 *
I father myself upon Ama – none before me, no other, nobody to name me, self-named, self-styled, eternal as her, and evenly wed, now and forever – Vivoce! My Niviana trembles at my audacities, yet in her heart of hearts can't but believe, commanded despite her demure, convinced despite protest, for we are two of one, two minds to one self, knit at the pith, sewn at the soul, selfsame, twinned and twined, equal and outro, love of love and life of life. No wonder all these practical supplements bore me so, tediate my days, remind themselves to my eternal forget, and proclaim such regal names as Duty upon my joy. Ama whispers in my ear and we share the joke, double the prank, laugh and laugh and love the guess of life. Ama is mine forever. And all of you matter, in so many ways, since you bring me each an aspect of Ama, the One.
* 890 *
Scriptures are read religiously, of course. That is an advantage, not that they are the best books ever written, but that many devoted people have taken them to be, and anybody who exacts a cult following, such as Ayn Rand's readers, likewise allow, let us hope, for those devotees to read something back into their scripture. So much is read into every particle of a sacred text that I wonder why the books don't burst at the seams.
The DCM 5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) has made itself the standard, the go-to book for diagnosing mental illnesses in the United States. Who gave it that status? If we remember the golden rule – who has the gold makes the rules – necessarily the insurance companies played a large part in determining what counts as a disease, and what is mere eccentricity. Whether homosexuality, bestiality, or pedophilia qualify as diseases has changed over the years. Countless studies, endless research papers, every manner of expert witness went into making this manual. Dry reading though it may seem, to the uninitiated, we can yet read between the lines. In the appendix we see at least a thousand MDs and PhD's had a hand in writing it, testing it, and researching it.
Another miracle of a book is the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), unique amidst all dictionaries of any language as being exhaustive, and a good field for fowlers who wish to find those strange birds in their original habitat. A book is heavy with significance either for how much work went into making it, or in how much work went into studying it.
Once upon a time, high art expressed itself through Opera. Whitman found clues for his cadence listening to arias. Nowadays, the cinema takes the lead, and merely by reading the credits at the end we see all films require the communal effort of hundreds of folks.
The internet as a whole can be taken as our age's great metaphysical contribution to the sciences and arts. Certainly, the ramifications will be as great as they were for Gutenberg.
Reading, meanwhile, may be like Opera: an art for refined taste. Though most anybody can read, few are literate in any meaningful sense of the word. Twenty years of education though we have in the States, few know how to approach a Great Book, and would shudder to waste their free time, to earn the freetime specifically in order to invest hours into reading and rereading a few great books.
To write a scripture – a rare deed, this requires inspiration. All effective writing is by nature "inspired," in that some muse, some deity, some collective consciousness, and her associated set of ideas, and persons believing those ideas, had to be internalized into the unconscious of the author in order for him to experience their re-emergence as if they were his own divine contribution. Artists, more than most, feel themselves to be divine. What makes a person susceptible to being possessed by ideas and authors? A private vulnerability, an oversensitivity, like Tchaikovsky who, as a child, cried out at night that the music would not leave his ears. That is to say, an author has to be sufficiently weak in order to internalize a Holy Spirit large enough to command a following. As the Shaker's said, there are many Holy Spirits, and every collective produces its own spirit. To write for an eternal audience, you must write for yourself.
* 891 *
Where have you been? I've been waiting here, destitute, bled out, deconstructed to my basic elements. Enough! Do I exist for you? As the immaculate Kant said, we are to treat others not as means, but as ends unto themselves. Are you really going to make me study Old World philosophy to justify my impatience? Refute it if you can. I don't have the patience for Kant right now. You tarried with Lacan, of all people, but don't make time for the gods? Is it not that, as Allism insists, both /and, we treat others both as a means and as an end, simultaneously, always, we treat our very selves, our bodies, our desires, both as means and ends. Why does everything have to be so black and white with you? I have my private meanings and uses for each person I know, and they for me; I use them and objectify them at times, and they me, and that's life. It's the way it's supposed to be. I am both an object to myself, many objects, and a subject to myself, many subjects – all is all. I use myself, I use others, as means and ends. You lack Respect. Respect is everything to me, and you will have to learn my central value if you hope to hold me. Always the ultimatum. That's a last action, to be used in desperate straits. No ultimatum. You will learn Respect from me and for me. There is no other way.
-- R ᴤ88s Я --
Perfection Is Easy
No comments:
Post a Comment