update, allays 924 - 929

 

Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:

Greetings!

Well tomorrow is the last day of work at my new job -- they closed down for funding reasons -- nor will I even be able to attend due to a smattering of appointments. I have had a bit of a ressergimento of spirits, up and down, so that these allays have a bit more heat than the slowness and lowness of the last batch.

Take care, Caretakers!

 

* 924 *

If one thinker claimed that art purges emotions (pity and terror in tragedy), and another thinker says art stimulates and intensifies those emotions, I myself would disagree with both, and go along with the sentiment, "In music, the passions enjoy themselves." Much of life is too intense to experience the emotions in themselves: they are chaotic, they lack purity, the situation is out of control, we are in danger (death of a friend, loss of a job, breaking of a heart – whatever). In horror films we are not really horrified and in blues songs we are not really depressed: we make of the emotions a play thing, a thing we can control and enjoy. Not the purging of emotions, but the confrontaiton of them in a form we can master, art offers us the language by which to command our emotions. Rhetoric regulates, rhetoric saves. Eloquence beautifies all.

 

* 925 *

Experience gives birth to memories, memories to assumptions, and assumptions to habits, the four ways of behaving: feeling, thinking, saying, and doing. An art form, if appreciated deeply enough to touch our habits, manages to change our feeling and thinking by giving us a symbol system (thoughts) and language (speech) to rechannel our emotions. An art, or that abbreviated and intensified art, religion, offers symbols for managing our feelings and emotions, a sort of hydraulic system or computer chip.

 

* 926 *

Who views the moral laws seldom frets the troubles of the day. That not chance, but justice rings the globe, holds heaven in her sway, reconciles differences, and weds man to woman, lets son kiss father and daughter mother – love binds us, Ama is love, and the day is never lost, least so when we've fought. Death is a step on the heavenly stair, and many jubilations we'll pass, eon by eon. Such dainty things we scowl over, and pray our worries hoarse – nothings, the news of the day is nothing, comes to nothing, goes to nothing. Only the eternal is news and stays news. I write for this.

 

* 927 *

Melville from sheer exuberance wore out his friend Hawthorne, dedicating his master work, Moby Dick, to the man only for Hawthorne to flee. So your friends finally flee you, Niviana, and my professor friend, one of the few I could talk philosophy with, escaped me. So much more am I grateful for you, who I never wear out, and who I dedicate this scripture to, as my image of the All. Squabble and scuffle though we may, my love for you never dims but glows brighter, like a candle that rather than diminishes grows with time, or a torch which dawns with your name.

 

 

* 928 *

Ah, Ama, the genius of these United States, universe wide and centering here, world navel, world axis, your body this continent, and every man woman and child of this country an aspect of your mind, thinking through scholars and fools both, through intelligent and simple, through blasphemous and pious. There is no other to you – you the allthing – nor is any rejected, but every man and woman sits at her table. You damn none but love all, include all, feel all, trust all. You are the Encloser. Poet are enclosers, set apart and yet representative, high yet low, the amplitude – apex to nadir, the full gamut. All of us think together, all of us love together – a nation of guns and fighting and endless fascination, endless dispute, brother against brother, sister against sister, the Civil War never having ended, but built into the fractions of our flesh – war and peace, hope and dread, all and nothing, for there is no other and we are All, all enclosed in your love.

 

* 929 *

America began as a violent revolution and perpetuates the logic of her conditions of existence in how she reproduces herself. This is akin to all of us, who, though we lament our youth, unconsciously repeat it in a sort of honoring, recreating the conditions that allowed us. We continually seek a new frontier, and project our situation unto all the world.

 

 

-- R ᴤ88s Я --

Perfection Is Easy

www.perfectidius.com

 

Update, Allays 918 - 923

Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:

Greetings!

I've barely written as of late, despite the various projects I've begun (the Seamings, the Emilegends). My mother in law, Nouhad DeVries, has passed, at the age of 72; her funeral was today. My employment as a Peer Support at Our Place ends upon February 28^th. We have all recovered from our various bouts with the flu. As the family has been processing the new terms of our existence, I've felt less inspired to write, though various projects continue to gestate in my unconscious.

As it would be difficult to work a job with my three children on Spring Break, Summer Break, sick days, half days, etc., we are considering that I go back to working as a free lance writer. I am good at this, but after doing it for 5 years I got burned out. I've had two and a half years to recharge. We'll see.

Take care, Caretakers!

 

 

* 918 *

Men are great idealizers and women are grand enough to sustain even the loftiest of ideal projections. Recall Emerson with his divine first wife, who died young and perfect. Later, in his second relationship, he would complain about the "Mezentian marriage," a sort of forced coupling between life and corpse: "Marriage is not ideal … the soul is alone … it must progress in ten thousand beloved forms and not in one … it passes on to the new …. The Universe is his bride." Ama alone is equal to my love, my endowment; I could disburden myself on no other but the complete all, and suffer her smaller frame Niviana to receive me in shocks of revelation, poised and pillering my immediate soil so we no longer come together like claps, but the eternal clasp of interlaced fingers. Have, not hope. Now, not tomorrow. This alone is real: you, me, us. The Self is sacrosanct: no God, no Prophet, no Son of God or Mother of God, no Aya, no angel, no Holy Spirit, nothing at all may violate the sanctity of the innermost. We are wed, you and I, because we are already one and have been unto all eternity.

 

* 919 *

What I name I can then command, but the nameless commands me. What I formulate, antipicate, foresee and explain I work into my rhythm. The stubborn boast of difference frustrates my expression. So much of my experience, my life, my vision and goal, lies inarticulate within me, so this other man, articulate in lesser things, takes the spotlight and leaves me in shadows dreaming of sun.

Poetry is the music of putting this with this and this – ultimately poetry is a nuance of repetition, the spangling of constellations. The music is necessity, the topics artificiality; if I get you singing along, the argument is won. Philosophy, the defining of terms, and grammar, the terms themselves and the logic of their interrelation, require a different talent than visions and dreams. One may be merely a lover and also a poet, but the philosopher must hate to purify himself of contagion. Power is distance. Seduction is never through truth, but beauty, and beauty is the desire to collapse distance.

I find myself hungry for nothing, hungry for hunger, wishing I had an appetite so that I could enjoy. Food curdles my tongue; I'm bored. Nothing to do but sit, nothing to do but wait. Something in me works, within my mind, the deep of my mind, yet the fire of passion hides in the embers. My inner garden works her terms.

If I insist on my truth for the wrong reasons, I will insist all the more till I find the right reasons. Where she touched me passes all argument. There is no arguing against experience.

 

* 920 *

Every genre comes to bloom – the high or the low, the easy or the astral. Renaissance painting prints the high-water mark of painting in general; painters persist today from sheer momentum. Superhero comic-book art in the West came into its own in the middle of last century and exists now mainly to inspire Box Office movies. Astrological charts once involved subtle characterologies, but lately it's hard to find the fine from the pretentious noise.

Opera had its day, but nothing new is being said that way now. Once hunting was vital, now it's a sort of sport. Necessity keeps its edge, but mere tradition grows empty and requires blasphemy, rupture, and schism to reintroduce a glance on the Divine. Mystic experience is the center of religion; many speak well of God, but few experience Her. Aesthetic experience is the center of art; many speak well of poetry, but few know how to experience poetry or cherish it for the highest divine it can, at its best, verily be.

Great symphonies require the musing of eager audiences: where all the world looks, the divine may deign say; but now that high music has past its day, nothing world-shattering can come from that cup.

New genres will emerge. Perhaps one day we will be able to write literal dreams and share them. Internets, hyperreality, electronic music, perhaps a direct mapping of cognitive patterns without medium – who knows? We may innovate a genre or perfect one extant. When a medium is in fever, it transmutes, metamorphoses, and becomes what it could never have become otherwise.

 

* 921 *

The forms of Romantic love derive from the Poets' exaggerated cases of unrequited love – unrequited by design to intensify them into severe impossibilities. How is it then that I am eager despite your requited regard? Truth ripens into eloquence. We each hold the truth of our experience, at certain nodal moments we set the stage for our full expression into life. Contentedness is true wealth; ambition is the counterfeit. Yet you and I find that Inspiration is the Blessing, the Muse the true redeemer, and you my Muse, I yours.

 

* 922 *

They call her Muse, the sisters nine, who inspire music, as does Kvasir's wine, but I call her Ama, her mother aspect, Sovf the Holy Ghost, the genius of language itself – so find me out in my echoing bed. I feel washed over like Ahab's bones, rolled like dice by toes of waves. Even as my wife loses her mother, and I lose my job, that greatest of blessings, inspiration, finds not my lips. Love bids me sing, yet I've gotten too fat and lazy for love. I feel to fall, to cocoon myself against winter's blight. I scarcely write now – my one fine phase – and glut on Emerson's Journals, Melville's Whale, a biography of Joseph Smith, old favorites to warm me in my shiver. I'm friend to fate, yet hope to barter life for life, love for love, blood for blood, and prize my triumph over one Niviana who is my dawn and dusk – painted sky of far away tells. Sweet sustenance, American things, yet I see better than Emerson and hope stronger than Melville. I find Smith a bit saucy and full of bravado quite different from myself. I seek quieter things. I gaze into my mirror, I read my own allays, I sing again my Ama hymns, and hope to lift myself up from this swamp by my own hair.

Am I saving for the singing days? Certain friends remind me of my abundance, overread and oversexed as I am with love for her. Most friends make of me a poverty, complain and chide and ill advise. Only in the presence of a few do my treasures emerge, and this learning exposes itself, all the wisdoms I've hived away. When the singing days return, all this reading and preparation will reveal in my work a compound interest. Meanwhile, on these shivering days I save every cent.

 

* 923 *

Nothing is simply true; everything is rhetorical.  Keep that as a talisman.

 

 

-- R ᴤ88s Я --

Perfection Is Easy

www.perfectidius.com

AMA LAUGHS!