Allays 1018 - 1023

Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:

Greetings!

So just more of the same over here: kids back in school, a few hours in the day for a job. I've applied at Schuler's Book Store. I will talk to their hiring manager tomorrow (Wednesday).

Take Care Caretakers!

 

* 1018 *

Ordinary people delight in the extraordinary; the Sage delights in the ordinary. What but all our childhood stories of dragons and knights and women too-beautiful-to-compare mean the very mundane day-to-day struggles the adult faces in the workplace, in politics, at home? For those who have no eye for subtleties, we show them grand exaggerations, mountains out of molehills, gods out of excellent men, and heroes out of everyday folk. Each morning is a resurrection, and each evening a samsara – we lead many lives successively, many lives at the same time, all within a hundred-year span. To see infinity in the everyday marks the eye of the wise.

 

* 1019 *

The Hebrew Prophets sublimated the grossness of Mosaic Law, redefining principles, reinterpreting old commands, making over completely the religion while yet claiming fidelity to it, just as the Upanishadists metaphorized Vedic Laws and introduced the personal to what before was communal. The New Testament goes one step further, with Jesus reinterpreting the law, "Love your fellow Jew as yourself," as, "Love everybody in the world as yourself," and with Paul recommending, "circumcision of the heart," as opposed to literally cutting the foreskin -- just as Buddhism made the whole of religion only about ending suffering. Nobody civilized sacrifices animals anymore, though they all used to. It gets to be that in practice Christians and Buddhists, on the whole, can feel, believe, say, and do anything at all, and still take pride in their titles. The more sublimated, the more gassy. Most Buddhists don't even meditate – they leave that to the monks; Christians rarely leave father, mother, wife, son, daughter, and all wealth to follow the Way. Leave that to the saints. Religions are fashions. The only thing that keeps them vital, nevertheless, are the deep practitioners in the center, the hearts that pump blood even to something as remote as the flakiest skin.

 

* 1020 *

"Guard your manly power, your health and strength, from all hurts and violations – this is the most sacred charge you will ever have in your keeping." Thus said Whitman, and indeed, the only beauty in man is power, in the strength and health of his body, and in his body-trained will to attack, attack, attack all that offends one's vision of truth. Man proper is athlete, enduring the pain, and ever greater pain, of growth and overcoming, the training of sport, and vigorous recreation – and this speaks most of all to such book-nibblers as ourselves upon whom the whole spiritual health of the future depends – us posterity's darlings, god's darlings -- with our duty to our strength and health. The mind is the body, and all thoughts come from the body, the experiences of the body.

In the swarthy vitality of the Prophet Smith, we see an eager beamer, haughty and proud to triumph wrestling his friends and contenders to the ground. A farmer's boy, a lush bumpkin, he never despaired the primacy of the body. Know that the mind is by nature eternally embodied, and know that the mind finds its health and main in the body and its pluck. Health is beauty. What we find disgusting is the degeneration of our ideal type.

We fight, and serve, and play the game always for the success of our vision of the truth, the good, and the beautiful, and dare we not embody it in our flesh and mind? Nay, that is where we must embody, or let us drop the matter entirely! Either I honor myself, or my honoring lacks substance. What matters the praise of the weak or the appreciation of fools? Whatever another may say of me – and sometimes it's been rather flattering – none of that matters a mustard seed compared to how my reflection appears to me in the mirror. Act in such a way that you must respect yourself. Make your life your ultimate art. Health begets health, but never did a glorious soul inhabit a wretched body. Beauty is truth, so master yourself.

 

* 1021 *

Emerson put every penny of thought into the savings bank of his journals, which he fully indexed, indexing the indexes, developing themes and fields into full-fledged essays. All of Nietzsche's grand formulations in his mature works come from the swamp of his four aphoristic books, where he experimented, dared some first-figures, trialed around, fell into digressions, and let the mess simmer. His Eternal Recurrence, his Slave Morality, his Overman, and so much more find their first inklings in the aphoristic fertilizer. Freud, likewise, regarded his Interpretation of Dreams as his dung pile, rife with fertile thoughts he would develop in his mature works. So these allays I view and review, memorizing favorites, drawing parallels and finding rhymes, so that in this upcoming decade – here I hope! – my mature works will find germination. An intellectual molts his genius every ten years, so let us glut on the stuff of our growth.

 

* 1022 *

"He who writes to himself writes to an eternal audience," said Emerson, and Ama places before me the conundrum of the dual marriage – Turmoil and Ecstasy – two brides – the central gravity in my care and concern, or in other words, God Herself. I suppose the trope fountain for another would be different, yet this is my struggle, and the body of my heaven is this double marriage, this breaking of my love into Psyche and Niviana.

 

* 1023 *

Ever this scarlet A of Ama about my chest, ever this knit of silk for you my kin, my darling Pearl, skeined in skin of subtle turns. How I raise you up my children, granting you the universal education we all should have – Mother Goose as babes, Aesop's and Grimm's as children, the American Renaissance for high school, the great epics and world scripture upon adulthood – yet spinning a word for each your own story, for each of our adventures are a stitch in the robe of Mattria, who dances to life all that is and all that is not. Gnomic tropes I give unto you, subtle turn and wink, span and sweep – small moves to win the Game.

 

 

 

-- R ᴤ88s Я --

Perfection Is Easy

www.perfectidius.com

AMA LAUGHS!

 

update, allays 1006 - 1017

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Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:

Greetings!

Well the summer is wrapping up: Natalie, my 12-year-old, has already returned to school, and the younger two return to their school – Excel – the following Monday. That will free up my morning to get a job, though I don't yet know what that might be. I've been writing more allays, as is evident here, but little else. I have been studying Confucius; I read the Analects and intend to buy a better translation and read them again.

I've had a few reviewers of the allays, and some criticisms I have received include: they should be organized into sections, they are repetitive, there are too many of them. What do you think? I would greatly appreciate your feedback.

Take Care, Caretakers!

* 1006 *

The mind knows the world through the body. By the Law of Correspondence, every abstract understanding comes from a physical knowing – a touching. When we accuse somebody of "sleeping with the enemy," the double sense of sex and sympathy makes the metaphor poignant. There is nothing so bloodless, not the square root of negative one, that lacks a physical correspondence in the body, our trope-source for understanding all things. Would you teach the abstract, seduce the senses. Would you understand, feel. The earth is the image of heaven, and Ama the image of the All.

 

* 1007 *

We overcome ourselves by fighting others. We must project our self-doubts upon fitting victims, opponents we can barely overcome, for what is close is too close to see, and what is near is too near to touch. The Greeks wrote the greatest myths of all peoples – more varied, literary, and memorable than the Hebrew, Norse, or Indian – because their myth-tellers were poets who competed with each other to tell the best stories. Competition may sometimes bring out the worst in us, but it often enough brings out the best in us, as well, inspiring an accomplishment impossible solo. Adversity exults us. The greater the opposition, the greater our self-overcoming.

The Olympians honor the gods by striving to be the greatest of men and women. War is the father of all things. Let war reduce to a game and it will meet its apotheosis. The Game is our Haven.

We need a scapegoat, a fitting external correlate for our internal strife. What is within us we can hardly approach. We must project. Thank Ama we have enemies! They service us better than friends in the line of truth. Love too often lies. A grand and exulted pride only glories in actual accomplishments.

Those who delight in puzzles relish the challenging ones. We are never able to fight or love until we've properly met our match.

 

* 1008 *

We can be indifferent to an acquaintance, but not to an ex. Our deepest hate we reserve for those we loved the most. Thus, I tend to define myself against Jesus more than my Niviana cares to hear, since she demands I cease the blasphemy. Blasphemy is the opinion of your neighbors' religion about yours -- they all blaspheme each other. Ama laughs. Words for words, and spit for spit. So long as we are arguing, we are not speaking of the All. Ama is behind each Divine and plays the Game against herself.

 

* 1009 *

Some desires require full expressions. What but the most heinous crimes we ogle over in our newspapers – that pedestrian form of entertainment – those sorts of brutal tortures and heartless murders, grant the criminal and us the readers a full expression to counterbalance an inner injury? Violence begets violence, nor can we fully cure a wound lacking a counter-wound. Art is the better medicine, and self-nurture the healthier antidote.

When you find the breaking point in your topic or person, distractions arise, all sorts of reasons to attack elsewhere, to look elsewhere. Simply sing the single tone, build resonance, that one tone repeated – keep hitting the one nerve, the simple small nerve upon which depends the whole collapse.

Every experience needs expression, directly or indirectly, brutally or sublimely. Silence is the brooding mood, to build a motive, to gain resonance. What is in will out. Build an appetite. Build verve. Patience is power, after all, so control time and wait your cue. Eru is Rhythm and builds to triumph, exultant in his resolve.

 

* 1010 *

I stole a glint from you, a glamour from your treasure, so signatured in your style that I hid it from all and only took it out far away, alone or with friends who never heard of you. To them I bragged of my wealth, with this shining gleam they assumed my own. Finally, I come to you, pocketing my star, and you sense an aspect on my brow, the light I've absorbed into my countenance, and you see your own shining as if foreign, and something in you loves, though you cannot tell why.

 

* 1011 *

You patiently explain to me your quantum physics, your big bang, your entropy, your multiverse, your string theory, your psychology – all these fine things! – and I do study them eagerly, taking from you what I can. Yet, I suspect in five thousand years, all these facts will look embryonic, perhaps even superstitious and wrong?

Or perhaps in three hundred years we will discover everything humanly possible to discovery scientifically, and advancement will halt? All further progress will be in abbreviating, condensing, and simplifying our exhausted encyclopedia.

Either way, I do not take science as my ultimate, but only as a means towards the ultimate.

 

 

* 1012 *

A vice contained counts as a virtue; a virtue run wild counts as a vice.

 

* 1013 *

Do not teach for money. Teach for the joy of spreading wisdom. Do not pay for your education. Pay with your effort  – and teach yourself, if you can. The virtuous rest in virtue. The creative triumph in creation. So teach the eager, but dismiss the bored.

 

* 1014 *

I agree with Confucius that it is wrong to requite evil with good, lest it be the good of justice; a reward would send the wrong message, but to shame with either kindness or a sneer may demoralize. Best, then, to maintain your self-respect, your concern for what is best for the evil-doer, and your regard for what is best for the world as a whole -- and the name for that is justice.

 

* 1015

Confucius was but one of many itinerate philosophers aiming to renew the Empire through their teaching; Buddha was but one of many ascetics seeking enlightenment; Jesus was but one of many self-proclaimed Messiahs ultimately crucified; Socrates was but one of many traveling teachers, called Sophists; Joseph Smith was but one of many prophets to come out of upstate New York, a location so enflamed with prophets and revivalists it came to be known as the "burned over district." What does this teach us? That Ama, or whichever of the Aya are playing dice upon a field, cast the token many times, failing yet and again until the one with difference arises, the apotheosis of the type. If Ama fails and again till her sparks catch flame, forgive yourself a bit if you also trip and fall towards your goal.

 

* 1016 *

I mistrust my first impressions and insist on time before I relate my take of a thing. Our first impressions are full of prejudice, and to prejudge has value only if we rejudge. Certainly, first impressions reveal something lacking in a lifelong familiarity, which is why we travel the world to find our own home and study the furthest from us to rightly see ourselves. So seldom am I impressed that I mark the calendar when I meet greatness.

 

* 1017 *

In high school, I requested my parents buy me the most generic of clothing, whatever would render me invisible in a crowd. In college, I ducked parties and spent my evenings haunting the university library, reading books and hiving notes. Even my marriage was minimum, Justice of the Peace, with little pageantry. I am not a man for the masses – I have no desire to be the center of attention. How then, my dear readers, lovers of my soul, sparks from the same sun, am I to finally reach out and find you my own – so many hiders in the herd and readers in the library? I suppose I will have to strategize.

 

 

 

-- R ᴤ88s Я --

Perfection Is Easy

www.perfectidius.com

AMA LAUGHS!

 

allays 1000 - 1005

Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:

Greetings!

Well I never did get paid for five paychecks (ten weeks) worth of freelance writing, so its off to finding another freelance job or – even better – taking the next step up the ladder of life. We win when we convert our stumbling blocks to stepping stones. This fall . -beginning next Monday, schoolwise) means getting Natalie on the bus at 630 a.m. and off the bus at 2:50 p.m. – parenting the kids after that till their bedtime at 9 p.m. So in other words – when to work? Best to freelance I suppose!

 

I'm thinking of returning to the U.U. Church I once went to just to socialize a bit on Sunday.

 

Take care, Caretakers!

 

* 1000 *

Ah, my Ama, O lady of knots, soft the hold that binds my throat. I ask you just to loosen – you have nails for such things – I can free the rest. You untie all but the infinite stitch, O lady of knots, untier of nots, the infinite stitch cum my vertical hold, the asymptote to fetter heaven. My muscles' skein over everything – guts and all – pins me like a pincer. Ever the boulder up, ever the bolder down, bound to them as I am. This vow unto death I won't Gordian cut, a mortal coil of snake to tail; I worry my brow and cradle my smile. I'll reflect again on you.

 

* 1001 *

The world is like Ives' "World" in Symphony 4: cacophonous, polyrhythmic, with three orchestras playing in different keys. Submitting to one language matters. Psychoanalysis and its remembrence of repression, religious conversion and its confrontation of sin, auditing and its clearing of engrams, cognitive behavior therapy and its reprogramming of automatic thoughts, Buddhism and its letting go of desire -- any of these will do, so long as you submit to the language, submit so hard your dreams change, the way Freudian psychoanalysis inspires Freudian dreams, Jungian psychoanalysis inspires Jungian dreams, and New Age metaphysics inspires metaphysical dreams – real dreams with real meanings, put into you to get something out. Language is a net.

So many languages clash in the world market: the loudest and most obnoxious win the day. Sheer endless sloganeering moves the populace. But to get deep down in there where the meanings are, you must submit to one and only one language system at a time.

 

* 1002 *

I cease to flaunt the gore of this cureless wound, the stream of pain of this broken heart. Ama, shut my lips with a kiss! The fullness of health is to express the ache with poetry. As it is, I'm swamped. Press your fingers upon my chest and hold me close with staunching love.

 

* 1003 *

Each experience changes how we experience every new thing and changes how we remember every old thing. Art is more than "Beauty for its own sake," it shows you the beauties and uglinesses you've already experienced in your life, but never knew. Every touch warps the lens of the I's eye. Innocence becomes experience becomes wisdom – the return to innocence.

We learn for the sake of learning a thing and also for the sake of living our life; everything is an end unto itself and also a means to a higher end. Only the lazy want instant results, but for those who delight in puzzles, the harder the better. Stretch me to my limit and break me a sketch. I am eager to grow.

 

 

* 1004 *

Every race is the chosen race; Ama chooses each of us peculiar peoples for this our peculiar role, to give the world something nobody else could give, from the nest of our culture and the womb of our creativity, the only begotten of the profounders among us, so that your people give of the best, humbly and with pride, give of the best of their people, you yours, mine my own. The world meets it with envy, accusations, and disdain – that part is necessary – yet, cast the bantling on the rocks, he will yet rule us all.

 

* 1005 *

From love we develop family and from power we develop work. From both we develop passion and from neither we develop rest. The four functions, then, are family, work, passion, and rest. The individual is healthy when he is able to love, work, pursue his passion, and rest.

 

 

-- R ᴤ88s Я --

Perfection Is Easy

www.perfectidius.com

AMA LAUGHS!

 

allays 993- 999

 

Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:

Greetings!

The summer is wrapping up – the kids will return to school. I've been editing old books written a decade ago. I've been preparing to finish the Emilegends. Not too much to report otherwise.

Take care, Caretakers!

 

* 993 *

You will meet with cruelty along the way. Preserve your innocence.

 

* 994 *

Don't tell me how to be happy. Be happy yourself, and I will observe. I don't want your pity. I want to admire you. My best friends are a few literary sages who made my life worth living and my sufferings endurable, who gave me a great vision of how I too may be happy like them. The god helps without trying. He doesn't command. He lives his life.

 

* 995 *

You nominated the source of your joy and the stance of my pride by calling him – how could I have forgotten the title? You torture my lapse and ruthfully give my puzzles and riddles to tease me back into remembering what ploughs your earth so well. Just a bare letter, "D," I have earned so far!

So we wonder as we wander, ferreting our memories for that primordial lisp when Ama first cooed our nomination – while we loved so freely in our mother the womb. All the world echoes with your song, so long as we stop to listen, the lullaby of the lulling sea, the seas of people passing their waves.

 

* 996 *

Discipleship is a noble game. Women may pride themselves upon their maternal instinct, but men have a teaching instinct, and the entire pyramidal hierarchy of greatness has tempted us all to more daring heights. I've graduated from my discipleship to Emerson and Nietzsche, and hardly return to them now – they are yet so with me. I'm under Burke now, and tomorrow? — I can only imagine! Masters are so many stepping stones. Don't get sentimental: wed yourself to none. I express my gratitude by seeking my own greatness aside from you.

 

* 997 *

Every relationship is a dialect, and your words are tokens in your shared game. Actions are also symbolic – they advance play. We use a unique language for every person we talk to, and constantly compete and cooperate in the dual game of love and power implicit between us all. That we share a language is cooperation; that we attempt to persuade and command each other — directly or indirectly — is competition. We prefer the games that flatter us, the ones at which we can succeed. That is friendship. The one who honestly admires you is hard to resist. Those who bring out the best in you are your soul's mates.

 

* 998 *

"Everything in nature seeks its proper level," said the Philosopher, and so much so is this true for persons who, playing along with the game, fitting into this role or that as others wished of them, relax and expand when they fall into their proper place, surrounded by those able to really see and hear them for what they are. Such a birthday that is, such a holiday from striving and pretending. We come into our own. We doubted – yes we did, we actually doubted! – that anybody at all could appreciate our intrinsic beauty, had the beauty to see that beauty, but now we fall into the gaze of our own, and they see us for what we are. Such relax!

 

* 999 *

Every worldview has its language, its grammar of terms, its rhetoric for inspiring fervor, its propaganda for gathering adherents. The early Christian rhetoric of the end of the world, hellfire, the first becoming last, and the resurrection of the dead, appealed mostly to social rejects the first few centuries. The philosophers of the time – the stoics and epicureans – regarded it beneath their dignity even to engage them. The Christ cult inspired histrionic martyrdom, and as dying for a cause dignifies it as worth dying for, their rhetoric held traction. Modern day atheism, which makes a rhetoric out of logic, insisting, not without a subtle sneer, that theirs is the only reasonable logical worldview, and taking pains to catalog the logical fallacies of their opponents, holds a sort of elite appeal, not to the actual elite, the geniuses of philosophy and poetry, but to those who would be above an opposition that touts itself as the moral guides of the world – as the four Abrahamic religions tend to do. For Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism, morality became a rhetorical device: God has made us holy (this is their humble arrogance), and we condemn all that is unholy. It is not, after all, as if morality were the most important thing in the world. Ask a school boy if he wants to be good, and he will frown. Ask him if he wants to be more powerful than his classmates, and he will perk up. There is nothing artistic or creative in morality. But it is the rhetorical device of the faith religions: God cares most of all whether we are moral! The atheist counterclaim is that "We have an intellectual conscience, you however are liars and self-deceived." All those rhetorical modes have proven effective, just as did the worldviews, and their inherent ideologies, of Communism, Feminism, and elsewhere, Buddhism and so forth. That all these competitive enclosers avoid the intellectual self-praise of atheistic "reason" does them as much good as would it do the atheists bad to dismiss that wedge.

Allism, as usual, is all of them together, the way they all strike and parry each other, and thus make a meta-dialogue, a truth each internalizes when confronting the rest. The highest in each is Allism. All mystic symbols rhyme, and for the one who has experienced the Importance, rhetoric is noise.

Thus, the initial selling of the missionary religions amounted to a denouncement of spiritual elites in favor of democratized spirituality: Jesus railed endlessly against the Pharisees – not hypocrites, for all that, but sincere master legalists – preferring the kingdom for sinners and harlots; Siddhartha likewise denounced the Upanishadistic scholars in favor of the simple who seek the one thing needful, namely, to pull out the arrow of suffering without asking who shot it or why, and this through a streamlined four noble truths (though number three is rather unnecessary in light of number four). And so historically every emergence posits itself as the corrective of its parent, and really no child at all, but there from the beginning, the way late-comer Islam claimed the original bible and gospel said and only said exactly what Muhammad came to say a final time (what they actually say being allegedly corruptions). That all of this rhetoric and self-posing has nothing to do with truth need only let us repeat the most profound moment in the gospels, when Pilate silences Jesus with the question, "What is Truth?" For truth was never the question, but only projected desire.

 

 

 

-- R ᴤ88s Я --

Perfection Is Easy

www.perfectidius.com

AMA LAUGHS!