==
==Okay
==This is a ROUGH draft of the essay Tetramatrix
==It needs a lot of work
==But I needed to cast it off for a moment.
==
==The four-matrix is about the four kinds of habits:
==feeling, thinking, saying, doing.
==
==There are four types of being, therefore:
==Saint, Philosopher, Poet, and Hero
==
==I am working this out.
==
==Take a look!
==
==
==Daniel
==
Tetramatrix
| HEAD | HANDS |
| HEART | LIPS |
| MIND | | |
| HABIT | DOING | |
| | Symbolic acts | |
| | SAYING | Simile |
| | Body laguage | Metaphors |
| | THINKING | Mixed Metaphors |
| | Metaphor mind | Symbols |
| | FEELING | Personas |
| | Creative Gap | Situations |
| ASSUMPTION | wholes | Stories |
| | structures | |
| | chains | |
| | Whisperer | |
| | Imago | |
| MEMORIES | stories | |
| | episode | |
| | experience | |
| | Fantasy Myth | |
| NEEDS | Pain and pleasure | |
There are four essential activities in the life of man: feeling, thinking, saying, doing. They stand for the four learned human faculties: attitude, belief, personality, and character. Hence, there are four habits he can instate through these. What is the understructure of these four, what does the systeme of four behaviors imply, and how can we make use of this system?
As habits, these four are felt as impulses and are willed through mind. The organic order of habit moves feeling into thought, thought expressed into words, and words to prepare actions. It moves ever outward, relating to the world. In example: I feel hungry, I think of food, I express this desire, and I act to eat. Habits are conservative: the impulse flows through four forms, with one need beneath it.
The understructure here is double. The head and heart correspond to the inner, the hands and lips to the outer, and the head and hands correspond to the specific, whereas the heart and lips correspond to the general. A feeling in its broadest is a mood. To address a problem, a mood calls forth a set of thinking habits. Thus, a mood is the lab table which situates the lab equipment. In the like manner, the lips call the stage, orchestrating other people in a comprehension and cooperation. Both heart and lips are generalizers, requiring interpretation. Thoughts are definite, actions are concrete. An action is irrefutable; words confusable, thoughts definite, and feelings flux.
Thus we tend to view the head and hands as the "hard" and heart and lips the "soft."Hard uses logic, soft, emotion, hard get things done, soft talk about it—so the archetypes go. Indeed, water/feelings and wind/words are things that surround us in ambience, like a fetus in his element—do not the mythemes explain all this? The fire/thought, and hands/earth apply to specific active forces, do they not?
Let's complicate and enrich our four terms to form a tapestry. Since there are four types of activity, there will be four types of people, categorized by which activity they emphasize: the saint, the philosopher, the poet, and the hero.
Hero is earth and poet is heaven; the inner heaven is the black of saint, the inner earth is the white of mind. The hero feels, the philosopher sees, the poet hears, the saint, burns.
The hero will never be found without his blade of atheism. Look afresh.
Sword, scissors, analysis, shining, demon—science.
Arms, artifice, ardour—art.
` You will note that Christianity prefers a series of idols, called icons or symptoms, and that the cross is an idol by any definition. Also that the cross was an image stolen by Christians, that Jesus was really hung over a stake, insofar as he was a criminal of that time and place. So who cares about historical nonsense, the cross is more important the Christ or the Jesus.
So the cross is a cross of types. Jesus is a half breed: neither full god nor full man, since he can't do the functions of either (not only does he dies, he is yet a virgin). And what more fitting death then this half wind half boy then to be suspended in the air like a criminal dog and to literally tear to pieces what is already torn to pieces.
Dionysus, the di-nasent twice born, is put into the thigh of God himself. Or perhaps he was quite the Godman when he was torn to pieces and devoured by the earth, but his innermost flame of heart grew anew.
The center is fire: the needs the logos. The mind is water: the mind the tao. Talk is air, body is soil. The stream of consciousness is set turning by the fire of need.
Everything is two except the center. And because the center is one, it is a dynamo.
oLO7o
That is, oLoLo
The perfected one
The complete 4
(the two Ls form the angle of a square around the inner orb)
A complete saint, complete philosopher, complete poet, complete hero.
Note that Nietzsche evokes at most 3 of these at a time, but never all 4.
Saint
The Saint is he who feels. And since the heart is what feels, and specifically, the hormones and fluids the heart pumps, the heart is the soul, the salted sea, as again the brain with his waves is moved by salted electrolytes, a dual ocean of blood and nerve. The saint is the blood. He is a connoisseur of emotions, disdaining mere pleasures, which he associates with the body. He is concerned with the voluptuousness of guilt, perhaps, or the what mysteries lie inwards. Ascetics are heart based—mystical experiences matter most. Mysticism is his epistemology; what matters most is what feels deepest or highest (the terms in no way negate each other). Thus we have the priest, the mother, the passive. Why passive? Of all the impulses, the heart is the most difficult to will. I can will myself to do kindness, to do work, to think of any topic, to say any conceivable truth or lie—but I cannot force myself to feel it. Or so it seems.
Heart is habit as much as the others. Though initially instinctual, it learns from human assumptions as much as any other habit. One must merely learn the love handles to control the heart.
What is ethical for the saint? Emerson wrote "Nothing is at last sacred but the the integrity of my own mind," in distinction to the church and Bible—but he spoke more of intuition then mind proper. The opposite feeling "my heart and mind are fully evil" mean exactly the same thing. It means this: my heart, right or wrong, is my central project. What is right for a mystic is what is moral, what feels right—the terms "conscience" and "temptation" take supernatural flavor here, and in fact, the supernatural is derived from the oceanic nature of the heart, and can have no reality or external existence apart from it.
A saint is entirely passive. If he acts in the world, this is obedience. Whatever the case, he is introverted, and desires to escape the world.
But lest we religionize this type too much, let us broaden the category. The saint is the mystic, the romantic, the faithful. A drug user is essentially of this category—he is concerned with mystical experiences of the more accessible kind.
The saint is history based, is interested in reexperiencing his own memories, and studying the mystical experiences of others (as recorded in Bibles and Scriptures.) It is not a study of the universal, per se, but of the nonrepeatable, and thus of constantly novel experiences. The great mystical ages were ages of myth and protoreligions (religions without the theology), as in the Hebrew Bible, and before that, the mythos of every known people of the world. Or as the baby begins: focused on the humming blur, and murmuring "dada."
The saint desires. He is voluptuous, and uses this libido either to scourge himself with guilt, to unify with God in a sexual metaphor, or to fall in love with a woman. What he wants most from the earth is intimacy. Compassion is his standard of goodness, but more so is sanctity.
The Saint submits to his heart, let's the passion overwhelm him, and submits to an external agent—God, Spirit, fasting, Nirvana, whatever—merley as proxy, as an external symbol of while which acts as a stronger will than his own only because it is external and therefore nonvolitional. God is akin to the bed of nails here.
The Submission to the act of God the externalizing, omnipoting of God, is only a gesture of weakining the mind's will in order to let the heart flow more freely. The heart evokes God, masquarades as God, puts Faith in God only in order to bind reason, to remove limitations. The feeling of infinity, eternality, or, in a word, limitlessness, is the natural feeling of the heart when the heart is not held in the hands of reason. Reason is always the limited, the defined, the tool, the handlable. But to fully enjoy a passion you must not control it, for God will die in your hand, the cherub falls ill, you are left with a passive rather than a passionate heart.
Few people realize how temporary, how fragile God is, how he may easily be killed off, and so the theologians must define him, logize him, make him a mental reality, when God is absurd, unreasonable, illogical, impossible—is not even in the dimension of assumptions, of logical experience at all, but is only felt, felt in a way that the word God is a poor mean thing, felt in such an exstasy that all we can say is I AM HE. This the mystic knows, and if he is wise, he will keep to himself. Poets advertise. Poets live by whoring their private joys. A poet is a sold out mystic.
The ideal value is th idea's value as mere object of contemplation. The true value of it is the contemplating that it allows.
The Saint who uses his mind is femine in that he sorts the inner. The hero who uses his words to explain his actions is the male who sorts the outer. Thus, a woman fantasizes stories, but a man only fantasizes images.
Whereas the saint is informed through the mystical, the philosopher is informed through the rational. He is not concerned with morals, but principles. He is not interested in the past, but in the eternal. He is the man of thought.
Thought is reified feeling. From the body and the needs we experience, and through active reasoning, we categorize experience into definitions. The philosopher knows the supreme joy of defining, of controlling concepts. For the philosopher is more active than the mystic. The philosopher doubts, active, whereas the mystic feels, passive. He is active minded, specific, and defined by what he believes and knows, not, as the mystic, by his attitude per se.
From the world he seeks education. His final concern is truth. He too is an introvert, and wishes to achieve truth rather then to apply it. And, being an introvert like the saint, he is concerned with self discipline, rather than power.
Logic is his tool for doubting—half his mind. He is ratiocreative, able to synthesize systems and definitions, and also to test them with doubts.
Reader, my love is for you—draw close! You lips blossom like a rose.
The mundus mundi, the world that is my heart, evokes a world to intensify my heart. When I'm in a mood, the whole world conspires to intensify that mood. Rude customers materialize when you are having a bad day to begin with.
The language of the Saint is music; the philosopher math and diagram, the poet poetry, and the hero technology.
The saint says "the way that can be named is not the eternal way," or "any God you call God is not the true God." Let's explore this diagrammatically.
Music intensifies and stabalizes feelings: indeed, the saint will always praise "peace of mind, sabbath of soul" as the greatest good: for him it is. He is akin to the hero who dances, only the saint dances not at all, would rather sit and pray, sit and breath. A Saint presupposed one who is the "greatest of sinners"—an anarchic heart. As it is said: the greater the beginning chaos, the greater the final order.
All music we hear, comphrehend, and assume becomes part of the one song of our soul. Everything we hear is harmonized into the one song. This song is in the pattern of our brain waves, in the ebb and flow of our hormones, in the thumping of our heart and the bellowing of our lungs. And below the music is the womb of chaos – a creative void held sacred by the real and universal madness in all men.
The poet is most sainlty when he emphasizes usic: metre, rhythm, pitch, volume, vowal length, tone – babes and odes get this.
The undersong is the language of our feelings and it is tied to, based on, corresponding with, the cycles of hormones into our blood stream and brain. The rhythm of our life is based on heart (soul) and breath (spirit) and the mingling there-between. These are literal, as in the actualy oxygen and adrenaline in our blood, and they are metaphorical, as in the breath of life and vigor that will eternally embed in our matter.
Speech ultimtely is the domain of the poet, and to a lesser extent the philosopher. A saint doesn't think in words, and if he hears the word of God, it is only when he reasons and rationalizes nothing tat all, but let's an assumption come directly into the heart of music.
The memories are akin to the feelings in that they are primary and direct, or so it seems, wheras thinking and saying are akin to assumptions.
The metaphor mind is a mind that dips between images, tied only by definitional/emotional similarity behind one interpretation of their image. There is a game I play with my friends, and I call it the simile game: one person lists two objects, at random, or even at odds, but never with an answer in mind, and challenges the other person to discover a clever correspondance. There is no point system to this game, and the only way to win is to impress yourself and the challenger:
How is a refrigerator like a baby?
Both contain milk.
How is a raven like a writing desk?
Both have inky feathers.
How is a square like street sign?
A street sign is so you don't have to ask-where you are.
When an assumption becomes a habit, a derective, it must pass through the bottom of the ocean as a bubble of heaven, and achieve the scent of the ocean, the heart. The sublimation of a memory into assumption is heaven, a heaven that must again pass through the hell of heart to arrive at the heaven of mind.
In the stream of consciousness, habit is the pull of assumptions into the mind; mood is the summon of certain assumptions.
Philosopher
Whereas the saint is characterized by desire, the philosopher is characterized by joy. The philosopher is the mind, and the mind is the nonextendable absolute—or in our terms, the experience of a nonextendable absolute.
The insolube becomes our wall of safety. Mind is object, heart is subject, and will is the projector.
The poet is the butterfly: he who expresses. Where the saint learns by mystic intuition, and the rationalist learns by rationalism, the poet learns by intercourse, by schooling, by scholarship. The scholar is a professor—he professes.
The saint is in attitude, the philosopher belief, the scholar charisma. He isn't concerned primarily with being right, but speaking well. He wants to relate to others. The love of the saint, the truth of the philosopher, matter less then relationship. This is why friendship is more important to him then romance.
The philosopher is a thinker, and as a thinker, his mind is completely symbolic. It is as if each symbol were a piano key, striking a heart string of feelings, with a dozen experiences for overtones. Or perhaps like a single milliped on walking on a thousand affects. The Saint touches the fire, yet he is unable see anything except fire, he worships the sun and the candle. The philosopher sees by the fire, but he is not obsessed with fire per se. He wishes to try things by fire, as Heraclitus said: "Fire proves all things, and reproves some."
Science and technology are cognate: one a technology of thinking, the other a science of acting. All actions, and all writing, are creating things, armed things, artifice, art. We have the scissors and we have the arms that hand them. So indeed our image might a T and an S, as in the cross and the yin yang. The T is the logos, the right angle, that which rends and messors, the schism of science. The S is the 69, the [, the unifier and pluralizer, is combining. You will see that the two combine – analysis and synthesis, into creativity, which is another ancient symbol for the sun:
±
That is, the ancient zodiac symbol, the cross and the circle, the line and the circle, the logos and the tao, the word and the way. Another symbol, if interpreted physically and not literally, is the American Dollar sign S and |U:
$
And this, with either one line for the I or two from the U in United States makes no difference, for it is akin to the healing snake of asclepius which in itself and also with its brother the Hermetic Caedomus of two snakes some wings, are the principle symbols of health in our country, along with the other golden snake on a stake:
U
But alas, this mystical stacking of symbols is not philosophical because they images are beloved and believed, whereas the philosopher does not belove or believe any symbol, but doubts, ponders, and above all man is cynical, skeptical, careful, and wary – and this in the best sense possible – and also speculative, rigorous, logic-chopping, hair-splitting, and difficult – and these again in the best sense possible.
The philosopher is of two registers. He speaks in defined words until he can create an image, and this is called reason. Or he starts with an image, and seeks out the words to justify it, and that is called rationalization. And this two can be seen as the + cross where two worlds meet, and the meeting point the cross-hair bullseye that Aristotle described as worhty and difficult.
In a Lacanian / Zizekian register (which is to say, a bad register)
violence-orgasm-hero and
heart-mystic-passion
are the Real;
mind-symbol philosophy
is the imaginative;
poet, speaking, words,
is the symbolic.
The problem with Quantum Physics right now, which the spin doctors say silly things about like "nobody understands it…it is beyond human comphehension" is simply this: the image and the words don't add up. It is very easy to imagine an electrong being in two points at once, or perhaps being in an infintite number at once: it is easy to imagine anything they say about quarks and electrons; yet they keep saying inconceivable. The only thing I as a layman have found inconceivable about quantum mechanics is how stupid scientists get with they mispeak of it. Also, when a taoist or a hindu steps in and say: "speaking of whacky nonsense, let me tell you about my religion!" we must conclude this way: grow up, improve, think better, and until then, keep silent. It is better not to guess about important matters, and for an idea that is not yet understood, do not call it difficult to understand. For once you have truly understood it, truly seen it instead of just heard of it, you will say that it is easy to understand. Once you've made your stand, you understand it fine.
The habits of the mind, of which the philosopher is foremost, are thinking in images and thinking in words. Indeed, the genuis is the man most fluid in moving between images, moving between words – puns and rants: watch out. For those teetering on the cliff of genius, the rim of insanity, this fluidity is too much, as if they were already on the ship of folly, pure unconscious intermixing like a Dionysian wine. I speak of two extermes: the schizophrenic/manic on the left hand, and the autistic on the right. An autistic, if he does not discipline himself, will flow from image to image, a fluid proeteus of an idea, letting random associations carry him to a thousand childhood memories. Be clear that the images themselves may not be fluid to the point of metaphorical mind (a dip into the emotional which autistics flounder on). They move from image tone to image tone, feeling the undersence in the metaphorical mind, but never softening the image itself. To be able to soften an image, into a sort of half-alive Platonic pure form – this is exactly what Aristotle called the true more of Genius. It is to unfocus the inner eye until the image is blurred, and then evoke another image and blur it, until they are sufficiently blurry to be equally, and suddenly we say with enlightenment: "the globe of earth is an apple!" As Emerson was given by an angel, in a dream and told: "take and eat!"
The manic and schizophrenic gets his kick from blurring words together. In some casis, the manic man actually hears a vowal shift, such that, "Get away, so help me!" becomes "God a wise sell ma" or some other weirdness, which, with the poetic ability to pun every word and particle of a word, contain worlds of hidden meetings, so much so that a manic friend I had laughed at the spammers who sent him junk mail because, as he said, "They are just throwing around the deepest ideas and not even copy righting them."
But technically, this is poetic thinking, and the manic is the poet is the ode is Odin, whose name means inspired freny.
The philosopher, on the other hand, does not think poetical at all insofar as he philosophizes. He is interested only in crystal images, and used words only and ever to vault an abyss towards another image. Yet the philosoper is not autistic, because he prefers to smash specific images together in partical accelarators, and believes in, speaks, and loves, only the most abstracted meanings. Let us say that a man grabs and apple. The apple is experience, is passion, is mystic. How unphilosophic. The philosopher is the man who balances his hand on the apple in such a way that he can balance a glass on the back of his hand. The accomlished philosopher can balance the glass while supporting himself on a mere apple seed, and the master philosopher can support the glass of wisdom an an open hand pressing down on five separate iotas.
The autistic, then, will be our hero, because for her, ideas stand for tangibles, and so she throws herself like an arrow into the bullseye: she is the pragmatist: what she thinks must be, and it is not, she could not think it.
The habits of the mind are not the mind. The streams of consciousness are symbolized by water, but mind itself is not water. Mind is force of focus, a willful and selective grvity. As Emerson says of good writing: "Omit not your own intention." And again "Good writing and brilliant conversation are perpetual allegories," as indeed they are: each clause must have 8 levels of meaning. And what he knew was that all of nature is an allegory for the will itself, that will is the most real thing in the universe, and yet, not the deepest, for the deepest is need (ultimately, each man's need is his name). All of nature is allegory for willful focus, and yet all willful focus is centered on need, which shines focusing power out, and pulls selecting energy in.
This image was explored with some fanfare in the Corpus Hermetica, in which the supreme image of insight was a vision of a flame surrounded by a power, and the power slowing the flame until it was absolutely still as a full flame. To explain would vitiate the effect.
For the spontaneous power must equal the assimilating power, as also said. You must make from your own substance, as a spider does, you must make with assimilated substances, as the ant does, but you must do both, Bacon says, as the honey bee does: mingling self and other. Or as Goethe said, "What is genius by the faculty of seiing and turning to account everyhing that strikes us." Utter openness would be utter corruption if it were not maintained by utter selection.
Poet
As the saint stands for memory and experience, the poet stands for assumption and language.
The defining word for the poet is beauty. Beauty is a pleasing sensual arrangement. The surest way to get a poet to change his behavior is not to quote morals or principles, but to present the change as fitting an aesthetic whole. If his change makes the world picture better—if it fits—he is pleased and enabled.
The poet, as a man of air, is spirit, and even the written words are still so much air.
He doesn't feel desire and joy, so much as flow and place. Nor is he focused on the past or the eternal, but on the future.
Art is the orientor of attitude: the connection between expressions and impressions, between art and heart is evident.
The poet is the speaker, and thus stands for personality.
Personality is a construction of verbal engines. The langauge engines, the speaking habits, are what personality is made of, the stuff of it. Even when we are alone, we are not alone with our self, but with our personafor ourself.
No man is miserable, or stupid, or ridiculous, only he is caught in his own world. If you want to make him great with your ideas, to shine your light on him, you must learn his language. His language, the ideas, the images that move him, the concepts he thinks by, merely need to be learned like any foreign language.
The poet, the personality, is created eternal, constructed immortal. When he touches into history, he moves in two directions: backwards to make way for his existence, and forwards to sustain it.
Study Buddha, Hamlet, Jesus, Yawheh, Don Quixote.
Nothing can come out of the artist that si not in the man.
Emerson was poet in that his foundational passion was writing, his ambition no less than to "write the Bible of my age" as a replacement for the Hebrew and Greek Bibles, a vision he chose at 21 and held to the end. In this he read Montaign, Plutarch, Plotinus, Goethe, De Steer, and Wordsworth religious, claiming that without such a daily read "he had no daily substance" – he could conceive of no good man who was not a great reader. He read only books that reported first hand experience – theology and commentaries were straight out. Likewise, he read nothing that did not "prophesy his own life," and used these readings to feed his own writing.
Such reading is not simply inspirational, but shrewd, since there need's no reinventing the wheel.
The key to being a poet is to use one's mind expressively. Mind is symbol, and always a symbol haloed in voice. Whenever we think any idea, somewhere in our conscious or subconscious is the shape of the projector: the image of the idea, and around that the voice of the idea: no thinking exists without both voice and image (or their corralaries), and insofar as we do not directly experience them, we nevertheless indirectly experience them.
Most people think in sentence fragments accompanied by dim images. This loose thinking allows for a quick flow of thought. To think complete sentences and exact images is slow, retarded, or autistic. Indeed most autistic people think in visual images. Since they do not bridge unlike images with words, the image itself must summon a similar image (voice is always a means of jumping into abstraction before alighting on an image again). A successful autistic will convert abstractions into symbols, so she can use them; some autistic people cannot steel themselves onwards without envisioning what "onwards" looks like through a visual symbol
As the saint knows, the universally appealing sounds, aside from your own mother's voice, ar the brook, the river, the waterfall. These all stand in turn for conscious movement, the streawm of consciousness. Fluid speech is never hated, is dear as love, as indeed, as Darwin suspected, music itself evolved from mating calls, and love of complicated mating calls based on the survival value of a complex and resourceful brain.
For this reason, the Greeks universally trained the freeborn in the guitar (lyre); Homer was not recited without it.
Hero
The body's duty
To say without the deed, one chews to spit,
But Bubble-Gum heroes waste their tongue
Time's bones will not be knit by deeds of lung,
For only blood in skin is worthy writ.
To feel without the deed one burns a corpse,
Or winds a rusted clock that will not tick,
For greatness breathes his spirit but to quick
The muscles wrestling wrenching hist'ries course.
The flame is for the engine's flashing fight,
The say is for the world to flee the way,
The will is for teaching body flight,
The sun is for the time to know it's day.
In lust and blood and rays of mind the flesh
Must make the world and joy and day afresh.
The hero is the man of action. Whereas the saint learns by mysticism, the philosopher learns through rationalism, and the poet by scholarship, he learns by empiricism. Thus he belongs to the age of science and the age of technology—our age.
He is concerned not with morals, principles, or poetic justice, but justice proper, the law. He is active, and thus must control his own actions lest they break the law.
He might have the right attitude, belief, and charisma, but he is focused on character—the integrity of actions. He is not concerned with love, truth, or relationship, so much as he is with achievement. Thus, pride and honor please him.
Mysticism was a study of the past in history, myth, religion; philosophy was a study of the eternal, and the sciences we build from it; the scholar studies art, language, people; but the hero studies business, concerned with power and growth. Thus he is active and hard—masculine—and not passive and sensitive. His central emotion is not desire, joy, nor flow, but passion.
David knocked down a stumbling giant, but he was helped by a God bigger than the universe. How can this impress us? For us, it is the Freidrich, whose self-love alone casts the great IWILL into the brow of God himself, that great giant in the clouds, and knocks him down to death. That is us. That is you and I. Whatever claims to be an authority if myself personally is a deathwish. And I grant that wish.
The men who do us the most good are the heroes who inspire us to become great. They lift not a finger for us, but do us more good than any mother's love could.
The deed stands naked. Words cloth it. A hero without a tongue is called villian. If any hero in any story were not to justify his actions with words, or to have the sympathetic bard do so for him, he would appear to be a villian, and indeed, he would be. The clothing makes the man—especially the words we cloth ourselves in.
The hero loves to touch. A weak person, by his fear of touching, causes more harm by his touch, for his finger is charged with anxiety. He wreakes havoc with his lack of self-trust. His anxiety, his guilt, make even his casual peck on the cheek into a stab to the heart. The confident strong man, even when he attacks you, is strong enough to gentle away your resistence.
The hero is autistic: for him ideas stand for specific things, and specific things are what need doing. the Hero tests all his makings through his keen imagination, grasping the small details. In this he is not the philosopher, who does better to omit details. An inability to think generally means that each specific image will evoke other specific images – a common problem for an autistic. On the other hand, famous mnemonists imagine every data they are challenged to memorie. Every idea is a symbol of a fact.
Most people think in dim images bridges with casual words. The hero thinks specifically, and for him, words stand for things he can measure by his handspan. An autistic learns nouns best, and here he is wise like great technical thinkers who think very rigidly, whose imagination is still imagation, but utterly controlled, like the chinese master abucus user who can imagine an abacus, even with eyes open, and do complex calculations by moving vir-beads.
Indeed, autism is based on timing problems in the sensations, and the sensations are from nerves, each nerve being part of the brain and mind. The heroes mind is in his muscles. Wherase the poet is prosodic, seeking what the newborn can grasp: stress, pitch, emphasis, the hero is more western, patterned of Odysseus, being a man of action, like later western verse, which is as linguistic as it is phonetic, beyond Homer's intent.
All movement is dance, comes from a hundred thousand years of evolved dancing and singing, and all language was first song. This returns us again to the saint, and indeed the hero is cognate with the saint over the philosopher. He feels. The hero is known for his heart courage and his brawn muscles. Hearing is emotional, seeing is logical, but acting is real.
| Heart | Head | Lips | Hands |
| Feelings | Thinking | Saying | Doing |
| Mystic Saint Morals | Rationalist Philosopher Principles | Scholar Poet Beauty | Empiricist Hero Law |
| Priest Mother Passive--uncontrollable | | | Scientist Engineer Active |
| Desire | | | Passion |
| Eve life sex | | | Adam dust death |
| Passive / Sensitive | | | Active / Hard |
| Woman | Man | Woman | Man |
| General | Specific | General | Specific |
| Orienter | Executer | Orienter | Executer |
| Attitude | Belief | Charisma | Character |
| Romance | Education | Friendship | Living |
| Love | Truth | Relationship | Achievement |
| Kindness | Truth | Politics | Justice |
| Beauty | Industry | Beauty | Industry |
| Discipline | Discipline | Power | Power |
| Introvert | Introvert | Extrovert | Extrovert |
| temperance | Prudence | Justice | courage |
| History | Philosophy | Art | Business |
| Myth&religion | Philosophy | Art | Technology |
| Intimacy | Education | Beauty | Living |
| Love | Logic | Language | Life |
| Past | Eternal | Future | Present |
| Desire | Joy | Aesthetic | Passion |
Complications
Head and heart is introvert, lips and hands are extrovert—that is clear. What else? We have also discussed head and hands as definitive hard, words and feelings as comprehensive soft. The break down is clearer in the two forms of discourse: logos and literature. Logos is the logical, whereas literature is the beautiful. We will return to this in the section "Two is for Biword."
The thinking / saying is the human. Feeling / doing is the animal. Thus the difference between the spiritual versus the physical.
You might not categorize yourself as any of these: a saint, a poet, a philosopher, a hero?—but fret nothing the archetypes or monikers. List your focuses.
Yet in a sense, we are all of these. We all feel, think, say, and do. Sometimes we may emphasize this or that, but we must daily perform all four. Indeed, the complete person, the Ololo, is all four in an artistic whole. And given that a rounded completeness is essential in creating a perfect person, we negate none of them.
Focus on emotions would be useless without action. They exist to be translated. We each have two immediate focuses: input and output. Input is the problem, the interest, the concern; output is the solution, the creation, the product. Thus a poet need not read only poetry write poetry. He may also focus on his own feelings, may be troubled and traumatized by them, and thus cure them by casting them into words and forms. Creativity becomes therapy.
What of the reverse? What if we focus on the art of otherst? What we create, in this case, would be a rich heartscape, a sense of spirituality, an attitude towards the world. Art is our focus, heart our movement.
There are three processes: eating, resting, and exercising. Eating is your concern, is your joy and pain (which often amount to the same thing). Resting is digestion and gestation, venting and reflecting, playing and forgetting. Exercise is creating: what you make from it.
There is always a flow between focuses. The primary focus is the source of energy, which flows into the secondary focus: the creation. As I have said, "sorrows sing"; this crystallizes the moment. This is captured again in the basic grammar of noun and verb, in the distinction between motivation and execution.
The fourth focus is the routine: what you take for granted and care nothing for. Conformity and nonconcern. Thus a "typical man" might think, talk, and do, but he doesn't explore his feelings. Or if he does, they are cliché feelings, introjected from the world.
The mystic is one who enjoys desires as desires, who enjoys, above all things, the garden of his own feelings. A mystic might study numerology, or sacred texts, or music of any sort, or art in general, but he is the connesour of it, and does not create it. He exists only to experience it. He is the passion in the garden of gethseme, anxious to the point of heartattack, or a drama queen who loves romantic entanglement and the pain of love for the heartache and romantic exstasy. The mystic does not merely seek euphoria, but also the blackest despondancy. I do not mean she wills to be torn, but that unconsciously she loves the pain. A mystic is a masochist. All that feels intense is enjoyable. And if she complains and wails at the pain, that is to enhance and excite the pain. If she disliked suffering, she would not complain against it, but act against it, and thus put it to an end.
All dogmatism is a code for programming an inner experience. Myths belong to the verbal and the heroic, and are patterns to emulate; we listen to heroes to fight our own dragons, to kiss our own dragons, to battle our parents in the forms of giants and snakes. The mystic does not care for the action of the myth, but for the static symbology. Symbolism, therefore, and dogma as systemized symbolism, are meant to crystallize and torture the heart.
The mystic, the ascetic, the sporter of a crown of thorns, does not inheret heaven—as if that were poetic justice!—but necessarily turns inward to a world of horrors and exstasies. The meek inheret meekness. Rejoice and be glad when others slander you, for you in turn will slander yourself, and seek always new places and ways to find ridicule. Read and realize that the promises and hopes of savoirs tell these masochists are also in the end more hopes, more promises—tortures and tantalizations. If they were ever fulfilled, that would be worse than pain. It would be boredom.
The heart is a garden, the mind is the sky, the words are threads, and action is land. Within the inner garden, we cultivate our emotions from the soil of memory, and cultivate these habits till they fruit. The world of threads are the tangled words of language and duty of society.
In Orwell's 1984, Winston begins a diary against the State. "Down with Big Brother!" Big Brother is Christ, or authority, thought police are angels, or self reflection, Obrien is conscience, the ministry of love is hell. He fails to realize that 2+2=5 (symbol + symbol = symbol, convention is convention). He mistakes love for taboo, and only at the end, after torture in hell, after a baptism of alcohol, is able to realize his love for Big Brother.
Memory is direct or replayed Experience of the concrete. Assumption is an abstracted, nonsensual experience of memory. Both our memories, and the assumptions our unconscious create from memories, are by nature passive and indirect. We cannot force a memory, nor force an assumption, but must consciously symbolize it and let our brains take them in.
Between our assumptions and our habits is the Creative Space. Our habits themselves are not sensual (memories) nor conceptual (assumptions), but are charges put upon concepts or sensations to drawn them towards or away from our focus of awareness.
| MIND | |
| HABIT | DOING |
| | Symbolic acts |
| | SAYING |
| | Body laguage |
| | THINKING |
| | Metaphor mind |
| | FEELING |
| | Creative Gap |
| ASSUMPTION | |
Habits impulse towards or away focus. They aim to act. The four kinds of habits are feeling, thinking, saying, and doing. These four constitute a continuum. Between feeling and thinking is the metaphor mind, or the unconscious, the part of us that dreams at night, or fantasizes by day, what I call the m-mind. Thinking is to turn fluid thinking into crystallized abstractions. Between thinking and saying is body language, that which we do not intend to say, but conveys our thinking. Saying is our means of fully crystallizing our own thoughts, so that we can communicate with others and withourselves. If there were only one man in the universe, it would still be necessary for him to talk.
Between saying and doing are symbolic acts, those acts which matter for what they mean as well as for what they do. Shaking a man's hand, donating a small sum to a given charity, smoking a cigar at the birth of a child, and countless other acts say as much as they accomplish.
The mind is constantly surrounded by these impulses, and itself can select towards or away from them, or focus upon any of them and thus instate them. A man is always feeling, thinking, saying, and doing in all things, and life depends on our constantly doing each of these habits simultaneosly. However, certain men prefer one or two of them over the rest, and this determines the tone of his life.
The mind is able to focus on two things, and thus can both categorize and metaphorize them according to how and in what way the feel identicle. Metaphors are a way of converting feelings into definite thoughts. Metaphors are actions—once a metaphor is thought, the experience it was meant to convey is felt, and the metaphor itself becomes mere ornamnet. All ideas have a definite feel, or if they feel ambiguous, the ambiguity itself has a definite feel, as a cloud can be photographed, drawn, and described with utter precision.
The creative space, then, is the lowest feeling habits, those of dissconnect, anxiety and depression, both being the same impulsive act. Thus depression, anxiety, suicide, fear, guilt, and pain are merely one experience of the creative womb.
The habits of internalizing, categorizing, and metaphorizing can shape assumptions into six categories: personas, poems, symbols, mixed metaphors, distinct metaphors, and definitions.
Personas are the most condensed and profound, the definitionr the most graspable and communicable. By these six levels of feel/thinking, we finally come to abstract and absolute definitional ideas, our philosophy in the rigorous sense.
The habits as a whole are the Unconscious insofar as they less obviously influence thought, and are the preconscious insofar as they more directly influence thought.
Feelings crystallize to thoughts, thoughts crystallize to words, words crystallize to actions. Actios are the most crystallized and concrete.
The "archetypes," the "inborn metaphysics," that we find behind all our stories, philosophy, and all the various languages are instinctual habits of thought that can, in fact, be overridden by education. Therefore what is universal is not absolute. And what is second nature can improve what was first nature.
The mind, with the hand of the habits and the glove of the assumptions, can reach in and shuffle the memories.
| MIND | | |
| HABIT | DOING | |
| | Symbolic acts | |
| | SAYING | Simile |
| | Body laguage | Metaphors |
| | THINKING | Mixed Metaphors |
| | Metaphor mind | Symbols |
| | FEELING | Personas |
| | Creative Gap | Situations |
| ASSUMPTION | | Stories |
| | | |
| | | |
| | | |
| | | |
| MEMORIES | stories | |
| | episode | |
| | experience | |
| | Fantasy | |
| NEEDS | Pain and pleasure | |
Memory is shaped vertically, tying episodes into stories, stories into motifs, and the motifs into a life-thread. A story is a program for action. We tell stories all the time between people; almost all talking is story telling. A symbol evokes a story. That is all a symbol is capable of, to present the feel, the tone, the undifferentiated fulness of a story. Story is the basis of culture, the understructure from which we build assumptions, concepts, philosophy, that great ivory tower which tickles heaven. An effective symbol when encoded correctly, is able to evoke the entire ambigram, the entire narrative.
Body language is in what the body expresses automatically, or with little deliberation. A gesture is an image of an action.
Two
A binary is not a system. At best, a binary can be a systeme—it is the smallest configuration of a system. In this sense, many concepts can be opposed to one or more other concept, and this makes for configurations. As with the tetramatrix, and any numerically based system, you can polarize a set of categories into columns. Here is the famous sexualities of words.
| Man | Woman |
| Up | Down |
| Right | Left |
| North | South |
| West | East |
| Good | Evil |
| High | Low |
| Spirit | Flesh |
| Sky | Earth |
| Sun | Moon |
| Out | In |
| White | Black |
And the columns could continue indefinitely. The basis of any binary rests in your normative set. The originary pair determine the shape of the set.
However, the nature of the binary itself is open to question. As the typical binary has it, West is either/or, East is both, neither. The West hierarchizes its binaries, whereas the East compliments them. At the basis of the Western binary, then, is the contrast of good/bad. That distinction determines all the other sets. Derrida attempted to get past this through deconstructing the binary, to deconstruct binaryism itself. We do not want the East where the binaries are complementary; we want to overthrow the system altogether. Which is merely one more binary: binary versus nonbinary.
The project of the 21st century is to unite the world. A system that integrated East and West would be Either/And: quaternal. Either this or that, either this and that, neither this nor that, neither this, but that. Which brings us back to the tetramatrix in the previous section. The future is four.
The opposite of a thing is never its nonexitence. Non-A is not the opposite of A. If anything, the nonA is the frame of A, for it puts a limit around it. This is justice, and all other things are nonjustice. But injustice itself is not the opposite of justice, because it is made out of the same sort of stuff, a social network, and attempt at fairness, a social system. Nonjustice would be anything and everything unrelated to justice. Therefore, the saying that hate is not the opposite of love, but apathy is, misses the point. Apathy is the nonexistent of passion, and, therefore, is the negative space of passion. But the opposite of passion for would be passion against. Apathy, if it were the opposite of love, would equally be the opposite of cruelty, hate, fear, and guilt.
Augustine was troubled to believe that God created all things, because then he is the author of evil, and then human beings are innocent, which is not something Augustine wanted mankind to be in any way. Therefore, he defined evil as an absense of good. But an absense is only noticable in the presense of a should-be. If that speck of dust lacks good, is it therefore evil? There must be a vaccuum, and thus a shell to preserve the vaccuum, for there to be a not-but-should-be. And because it is a vaccuum, it must be carefully created to last in an atomsphere were good is everywhere in all things. Let us cleans our science from theology!
Evil is too much of something, something that overwhelms us, more than we can see or bare. Evil is too good. Well then, what is bad? Bad is bad for us, something that denies our needs. Everything equally exists, is equally there, but some things fulfill us, others deny us.
Logos or literature. Plato differentiates logos versus mythos (philosophy versus religion); literature is broader than mythos. The Logos and literature distinction derives from love versus truth.
Why this breakdown? How is there a polarization of truth and love? Consider that truth is reason, and love is emotion. Or in social terms: some of us prefer to work with ideas and numbers, others prefer to work with people and relationships. This could fall back in with the man/woman distinction, but not necessarily. There is no sex to love, and indeed, the sexing of love is to make love into one thing. There is masculine love and there is feminine love. Let us focus then on people versus ideas.
In the either/and mindset, one is the focus, the other the outlet. The philosopher, for instance, focuses on ideas, but he expresses them out to people.
Incidentally, the Eastern Monism seems to me a quicktrip to its conclusion—"all is one, dualities are fake, all is Brahma." Yet monism distinguishes itself from dualism. It still maintains that the world is maya, illusion, not Brahma. The Western monism says the Universe is the Material, devided into many interrelated parts. If you wish to unify a duality, do this through careful attention, not through unfocusing the eyes. Integration is done by mind, not by faith.
A personality is harder to define andeasier to understand than a system. It takes an intellectual to systematize his actions according to Kant, but anybody can ask "what would Jesus do?" Why? Because as humans, we understand personality systems more then logical systems. Logic requires abstract focus on principles. Personality is intuitively accessible, if impossible to define or fully predict.
| Love | Truth |
| Love | Fear |
| People | Ideas |
| Rest | Power |
| Flesh | Mind |
| Earth | Spirit |
| Sex | Violence |
| Life | Death |
Previously I contrasted love with fear. Now I contrast love with truth. In what way is truth related to fear? Fear is not about cowardice. Fear is about recognizing danger and reacting to it. Thus, courage, bravery, dominance, submission, these are all fear attitudes. The decorated war hero is a fear based thinker. It is in terms of danger and power that he exerts himself. Whether or not he feels fearful of others, or feels noble dominance, he is focusing on power and not love. Or if there is love, this love bows to power.
Truth is power, yes, and the need for power is fear. As it is said: the weak in bravery are strong in cunning. Love, however, is separate then power.
Remember that Maslowe categorized the basic hierarchy of needs in a pyramidal structure of physical needs, safety needs, belonging needs, esteem needs, aesthetic needs, truth needs, and the need for self-actualization. Belonging is about power and love. How we fit into the group is both who loves us, and also who uses us. A job, for instance, grants a sense of belonging. If a man is depressed, working any job amidst respectful peers will cheer him, as it is rightly said: work cures depression.
Love versus truth, and thus, love is on the side of deceit, on artifice. To have secrets, and especially secrets from oneself, gives a sense of depth, autonomy of the unconscious, relaxing of the will.
The truth of love is that it holds no love of truth.
We attract lovers in a way none of us understand; we enjoy it for its mystery.
Freud famously divided the libido into two directions: thanatos and eros. Less mythologically, more directly, we have in fact a very ancient binary of making and destroying. Or to chart it out:
| Analysis | Synthesis |
| Cutting | Combining |
| Violence | Sex |
| Truth | Love |
| Concept | Relationship |
| | |
Since sex and violence can never be dissected from the other, but every act of sex is also an act of violence, and every act of violence is also an act of sex, we ought not say that they are "opposites" so much as degrees of one act: care, creating, crea.
Sex and violence inhabit every atom of our discourse. Sex—that which joins two things, love; violence—that which divides one thing, fear.Charisma is a form of sex; nobility is a form of violence.
To desire freedom, one must be a slave. Freedom is sought through violence, which is a breaking away of two things.
According to the Greeks, and particularly the Theogaony, the original being was Kaos, and from her sprang Eros. Kaos is clutter and disorder, pushing away from each other, and Eros is simplicity and union, pulling together. From the interection of these beings, the universe becomes Cosmos, Beauty. In the Bible, we also begin first with Oceanic Darkness, and only later does Consciousness order words. Scientifically, these stories mislead, but psychologically, they describe inner experience.
Science is to schizm and scissor off a bit of reality, to intellect, to lecture between the lines, to read between, and pick out, the dilectable pieces, to grab at the logos, or the select bits of experience, to read out of, riddle out, reason out, find the ratio between experiences, meaning to compare them, to parse them into parts and partner them as equals, to weigh them manually, and thus measure them, as a music is measured, and man the measure of all things, man being the mindful, by which is meant, the mentor of wisdom, the wise, to wit, having vision, to see, as the seer, to notice, to know, to gnosticate, to think, a thanking of the feel of thought.
Magic is the power to make magnifient machines, to might as he may to maximize, being the potent master, the paternal maker, the ruler, rector, regal straight maker, having the power to make potent poems, the technology by technique by which we work the urge to create, with increasing crescendo, like a growing cresent, as the grass beneatht the moon, which with horns turned left, grow like a lefthand increase in creativeness as is capable by the disciple who loosens the the text through analysis, breaking apart, and finally does, facilates, makes into fact, fashions, figures, forms out of dough, does the bread, morphs it into form—as bread-making was the first magic, the first and only transubstantiation from grain to bread, the broken, fraction, shared between friends, the change of life into life, through the gift of fire, to artifice the articles, by arms, to articulate the articles, the parts into a joint, a joining of pieces.
The verse is the universe's trope, who turns a phrase, who walks it out, making like a vulva, a thrown twist, a circle, inverting, reverting, converting, diverting, by ever twisting into twos back on itself doubling,the duo-plus, two-fold, ever turning, returning, circles, to throw in a circle, to throw, reject, introject, conjecture, the objects and subjects before and under our experience, a testing of a text, weaved and textured, in circles like a spindal, spinning by the tactile touch of textile, the textured and embedded technique, as all technique was originall weaving, and all making was originally bread: cloth and bread, the basis of it all, food and warmth, and also to buid buildings.
And all this from need, the nautical, the idea of death, that lover of life that makes mortals creative.
The American virtue of speech is directness. This couples beautifully with the American extroversion, and thus with anti-intellectualism, inventiveness, and cinema-celebrity culture. What is the value of indirectness?
Indirectness accords with fear, and thus with subtlety and intelligence. An introvert, when faced with a problem in the world, when insulted by a coworker, does not spit the poison back at the person. That is heroic, to slap for slap. No, the coward "prays for his enemies," or, in other words, internalizes his enemies. He becomes divided and brews poison.
Intellectualization. It is based on wishing to control problems through ideas. Though logic is direct, a direct play of identities, intellectualization itself is an indirection because it does not directly answer its problem. Intellect wishes to comprehend the problem, perhaps ruminate on it for weeks. Intellect is an interpretation of reality, a changing of it, a representing of it as ideas, which then are addressed.
Intellectualization is not interested on solving external problems, but internalizing the problems, and solving them there. The external problem may persist. A man, for instance, might be a failure at relationships; he studies and understands the flaws of his relationships, knows why they go wrong and why they should go better in the future, but never changes his habits.
At best, intellectualization is a temporary working out of a game plan. The mind, used best, pours forth into changing the external.
An extreme introvert indirects everything into feelings. This renders him hermetic to the world: he doesn't play the game. He may grow resentful of the world and its demands. He prefers solitude. Good for the person who needs it.
Procrastination is indirection. One avoids the pain of reality by putting it off. But because it hurts to put off, to be indirect, procrastination worsens the problem. To attack problems directly and instantly makes strong (if not smart).
Ultimately, we have the strong and beautiful, or the clever and cunning. Rarely will a genius be beautiful. Or if he is beautiful, he is yet wounded. The brilliant are neither strong nor beautiful. The strong and beautiful—the blessed for eternity—are always simple (American, even), because they are direct. The cowards, the weak, the ugly—also the slaves and the faithful religious—must live by poison, seek to weaken and control the strong.
America is yet strong and beautiful. Thus her simplicity and lack of philosophy. Philosophy is for wise greybeards. America is yet too young for philosophy.
Logos is reason and reasonable speech; applied, it is accomplishment. Literature is emotion and beautiful speech; applied, it is relationship.
The essential task of logos is to analyze. Thus it is invading, violent, distilling. Analysis is something active you do to passive experience. Sensations happen to us, but analysis we do. Thus the familiar breakdown of passive/active.
Or to put it into another register, the logos invades other things and seeks to be contained within them; as in the man seeking to penetrate the mysteries of the womb. It is man's fate to intellectually contain his wife, and his wife's fate to emotionally contain her husband. But since logos is a scalpel, it works to comprehend the container, to break down the the mysteries of life.
The logos is a system of ideas, as opposed to literature which is a system of person. Some of this is teased in the logos poem of the book of John: the Greek idea of logos is commandeered into a poem about Jesus ceasing to be a logos, and becoming a person. There was no Greek Logos in the first book of Genesis. The Greeks had moved from mythology to philosophy:
technologyartphilosophyreligionmythology
The Greeks were readily able to transfer from mythology and its curlicues of religion into philosophy, with few hybrids of theology between. The medieval gestation pushed the philosophy of the Greeks—their humanism—back into a theism, which was finally overthrown by the Renaissance art, followed by the Enlightenment science, and its industrial revolution.
I make no distinction between writing and speech; they are both communications, easily interchangeable. Literature, which derives from the word "letter" for me is merely one form of spoken / written word.
Whereas logos is analytical, literature is integrating. Literature wishes to give a whole picture, as painting is nonlinear, and presents a whole picture. Thus, it relies on symbols, as opposed to logos, which relies on signs.
Logos is paraphrasable. The truth can take infinite forms, and still be essentially the same truth. But beauty must stick to one form to be the same beauty. Learn math from this book or that, it's the same math, but read about this hero or that hero, and the difference is complete. Logos is literal, literature literary. Literature is nontranslatable. In its most literary form, the poem, any attempt at translating it between languages is ludicrous. A translation of a poem is merely a new poem inspired by the old.
As logos seeks to break the essential from the complex, it is the violent muscle, the masculine. Literature wants to contain her reader in her comforting muscle—the womb. It is muscle envy, not mere penis envy, which characterizes the femine. The poet is filled with womb envy. Freud's relationship to Nietzsche should be clear here: he felt overinfluenced by Nietzsche's ideas.
Logos is about content, literature style. Logos strives for simplicity whereas literature strives for richness. Literature is repetitive and dramatic; it is rhetoric, made up of tropes. Logos is simplistic and direct; it is argument, made up of syllogism.
And by now the complexion is felt: you can guess at the rest.
What is psychology? A logos, apparently, but a logos about people. What would a Freudian case-study fall under?
Psychology is indeed a logos, because it isn't interested in person studies, but cases from which we can universalize. Psychology is not dramatic, not narrative based. It attempts to be a science, and thus a logos.
And does the whole enterprise of philosophy get this treatment? Yes, of course. But you must not imagine an either/or. Remember the either/and. This is the framework of the yin yang emblem, in which yes, I am black, but not all black; I am literature, but I use logical constructions; I am philosophy, but I use rhetoric to speak. The either / and implies you must choose either, and get a part of the other as well: for one flows into other.
Logos, in its most reified, math, emphasizes the atomistic of experience, and thus analyzes the world into the slightest nuances; liteaturature, in its most reified, poetry, emphasizes the thick of experiences, and thickens the world.
Propaganda art is failed arts. Dadaism, for instance, begins with a manifesto, and so is not even art, but a sort of philosophical experiment. Since Beauty is not her mother, the art hurts the eyes.
Story is universal. We all pattern our lives on the stories we hear. The ear is a labyrynth, the hero threads his way inwards.
Lawyers, critics, theologians, psychologists are all rhetoricians. We ought to combine and mingle the axioms of each discipline into a basic field of study: interpretation. Rhetoric is interpretation made beauty. Stories about stories.
The womanly practice of psychoanalsis, to see your whole life in terms of family orgy, is merely codified gossip. That is the nature of most stories, the family struggles, since people get most dramatic when they are pressed close to each other, not unlike cats or mice, start to devour each other.
Love and glory: that is all that matters. Or rather, what is lovely, and what is seen as glorious—that is greatness itself, is the center of this bipole.
