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
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