"circuit boards PART 2" an essay

So I continued that essay I sent yesterday (circuit boards) because the concepts I wrote opened up many new ideas, and with the help of a conversation with a friend, I had a lot of material to work with, though as you will see it has not been fully integrated and edited. I think there might be a part three to this essay soon as well!

Daniel Christopher June

 

Circuit Boards (part 2)

2.

And so though the immediate I of a man is felt as standing a step back from the senses, his full self extends not only to his body and senses, but his possessions, and even the influences he has upon his friends; and indeed these serve as much as an unconscious mind to him as does his personal experience.

Friends can block you from certain directions. Lacking that friend, something must block you from growing in that direction, a vice or religion, or perhaps you will give in and become that. A man therefore, is fully himself by putting bits of himself in the minds of others, and he thinks through the minds of others just as much as he thinks within his own mind. It is like the sun, which communicates through the light it sheds, to all other suns, and yet is moved and shaken by the planets which orbit him, giving him the character of a caregiver. So too are we moved and shaken by those around us, and some friends block our light from shining in this direction or that. A man does not even know himself until a friend has told it to him.

            The attitudes that others have of him, from the internalization of “the general public,” to the internalization of “those who really know me” act not only as a standard a person may identify with (I really am this way), but also as a social context (though I am this way, I must mask it from others, because they don’t understand.) The innermost self believes in its immortality, believes it has always existed, and believes it is the most important thing in the universe. This is the wisdom of the innermost, which is utterly stubborn before the world.

            The Me, as we looked at earlier, is the most basic and intimate face of the I, and yet it is not full without a me-for-others, a persona-for those around us. But the full Me, the full personality, is made up of the world, for we don’t really have others, we have our images of them, which negotiate constantly with what new information they give us to process. This is indeed intimacy, there can be nothing more intimate than that, so much so that we are the world we see. But as for the conscious I, though it comes in many layers and registers, it is forever cut off from the I of others. Nobody can think for us. This is perfect place of the internal garden.

            But even the personal space of the I, the antechamber between the senses, must find its shape from a literal space in the world, or an imaged space from art. Life is when we are doing what we love best to do – to “really be alive.” What we live for, something chosen and yet also from our nature, and thus the child of will and need, is the commanding reason why we live, and allows us to compromise on all the other duties and necessities of life. This peak experience must find a shape in a representative place, and that place becomes the shape of the mind happy.

            Care is the mind’s focus on importance. Freedom always means freedom from fears, from caring about painful things. Ultimately, we need a space to be free, a place to misbehave. The staunch philosopher must have a naughty playground somewhere. For wherever we exaggerate ourselves in one direction, we must stretch equally in the opposite direction to balance out. The heart’s garden, the mind’s study, are created from certain experiences, or from many of them blended together, to make a place we can think freely: objectively the body takes a chemical tone in its hormones, its muscles take a pose, but inwards we live in that imaginative space.

            Thus it can be said that we base beauty off our mother’s face, and base authority from our father’s tone. These become first of all symbols, or metaphors for the whole concept, and finally become the very syntax by which we base the much wider experience of beauty and power we confront in the world. Personal experiences, initially so complex, hollow out to stand for more and more similar experiences. This is akin to what we learn from etymological dictionaries, how a word initially stood for a gross sensual fact, and grew more and more spiritualized and generic, for absolute unity stands at the end of long thread of thinning out of reality.

            An environment we say has a mood, an ambience, a “sense” an atmosphere, a character. Ultimately, this derives from the personalities that choose it, alter it, and inhibit it, and the types of personalities who would choose it and could thrive there. Places range from the literal room around you, to the barest geometrical idea of “room” in your head. Between this, and situated not only in memories, but also in all abstract ideas, is a cognitive “room” or space we place it in. Ideas are not held together by webs and diagrams, as the textbooks say, but by a certain metaphorical geometry.

            Decorating internal spaces and external spaces can be gaudy, sloppy, and clumsy, or sparse, expertise, and exquisite. Each ornament should symbolize the unity of the room, trigger the moods and body stance that suit the functions within the room. Ultimately, a room, like a building, like a person, should hold together on one central name, and let all its parts radiate from that.

            We internalize spaces, therefore, as fitting environments for the roles we will have in them, and a man cannot be the same man whatever his environment, but he is already cast in the tint of a role merely by standing there. Each space grants it own freedoms and constraints.

            Events stand for ideas. Historical epochs as well as hour long events become pure language, metaphorically, and finally, literally, when nothing is left of them but stories and sometimes a single word.

            Sometimes the people who live with us lack the distance to step back and get us. They take us along with the environment, and can’t see us apart. Sometimes the deepest friendships, with the greatest insight, are between people who never meet face to face. Sometimes the greatest respect a man has for another is for an ancient writer, or a forefather.

            The rose is the West’s flower, and stand for beauty and love; the lotus is the East’s flower, and stands for enlightenment and spirituality. These ornaments suggest the metaphorical attachments, and so are able to uphold them. In the same way, an environment absorbs the personalities who come to it, and yet it chooses the persons in turn.

            This explains the logic of the living house that fascinates so many horror stories, a house that witnesses brutal murders and becomes evil. The sense of the living house is intuitive, especially to creatures who anthropomorphize all things, but perhaps there is more to this idea then the sentimentality of it would first indicate.

            Freedom to misbehave at times is the only way to maximize obedience. When an important political figure visits a university, some of them put up “free-speech zones” where the students may protest and picket, out of sight of the cameras and the politician. This is an affront to “free-speech” but in a different sense, each of us must have a space to really misbehave, break the laws, defy convention, raise hell, and this alone maximizes obedience. Without that space, to misbehave, we could not be good citizens, nor conformists. In the same way, we each need our own garden to tend, that place where we own everything and do not have to share our will with others. That private space also balances the will.

            Nomination makes One thing stand for many, and so takes our care for the many, and concentrates that importance on the one. We must merely believe that the one thing represents the class, that it is nominated, and so long as we do, that is real to us, and it becomes part of our language. Rooms, objects, and friends all become nominated in our minds, they represent a class of ideas, attitudes, and experiences. They become not only persons, and objects, but also ideas and language.

            The apogee of love resides in those moments of intense mutual care called intimacy, and this can never be bought from a psychologist, nor even expected from a friend or lover, except with an earned trust with proven fidelity, and even then, the actual moments of touching heart to heart are brief, and fulfill us in that – for sustained intimacy becomes so tender it hurts. We may say to a lover “you make me feel free,” but intimacy is the opposite of freedom, for there is no power in it. Thus though it fulfills us greatly, it does not fulfill us completely in itself. Otherwise we would be born with four legs and four hands.

            Learning how to love is a difficult process. Learning how to stop loving can be even more difficult, for so much is at stake. The private internalize world of our mind does not fulfill us fully until we plug it into object reality. Then it serves as an interface. But when the objective world ceases to cooperate, when other friends and lovers withdraw their hurt and refuse intimacy – and this can even be in the act of making love – what can we do but suffer at the shame of holding out a gift that has been rejected?

            Words are crystallized desire, which melt when we submit to them and take them to heart. We must be able to understand, and yet we cannot be perpetually open, or we will suffer foolishly, and become calloused. Intimacy is a shared metaphorical place, an imaginative place shared by two minds attuned. To bring two minds together, so that the internal environments are reciprocal and mutually open, requires a certain language, and again a magic language, where the words are fused from desires that can only be genuine.

            The request for love comes only from weakness, nor can power demand it. For at that moment we request something, request another to see our beauty and accept it, to admit that we desire it, we make ourselves vulnerable. It may take courage to do this, but in itself it is an act of weakness, a risk we must take. A recent bumper sticker gloats “love wins” but this is inaccurate. Love loses. It loses freedom. Power wins. And yet though power demands respect, and gets it, desire cannot demand love, and can only get it by opening up tender beauties. Love is the loss that fulfills us.

            The heart is full of many emotions and desire, and must find expression for all of them, often many of them at the same time and towards the same object. And yet each person, place, and thing in our life becomes more comfortable as a predictable conduit of such emotions, letting them do the most through them; though dynamic and somewhat unpredictable, the men and women and places in our life not only persist in their stereotypes, but sometimes see us looking at them in that way, and become even more aligned to our view. Of course sometimes they resist it, but not as much if they do not perceive it consciously. And once we are used to a certain set of characters and situations, it is easy enough for our unconscious mind to convert all other characters and situations into repetitions of them.

            And of course, we can stereotype our own image of ourselves, convert a few slogans about ourselves into automatic thoughts. “Well of course he doesn’t like me, I’m boring” – I’ve heard this audibly spoken by friends, and then when I pursued it, those people denied they really meant it, though they felt it, nonetheless. Like all jokes, they say something but deny responsibility for meaning it; they communicate but can’t be held responsible for having communicated it. This is the virtue and vice of jokes as well as light talk.

            And thus we come to the indirectness of love, for though love seeks direct contact, it must seek it through indirect means, and though power seeks to misdirect threats, it must do so by directly mastering them. Power is direct, but love is indirect.

            The body, being the medium of communication, and also palace of the internalize world, stands as a microcosm for the world and its relationships. The flow of emotions and the stance of the muscles evoke our many environments, and summon them through mind with a mere flex of the muscles and pinch of desire. Not only does the body communicate through its many gestures, but also in how it structures the skin and muscles, which stand again for the meeting place between needs and world. And so certain anxieties trap the expressive energy and depress its source; certain gestures substitute for the act, either to communicate to others, or to unconsciously express what we aren’t otherwise controlling.

            Gestures express emotion, and so give us peace. Love does not grant freedom, but frees us from freedom, from responsibility and duty, for love brings pleasure, and pleasure unfocuses the mind. For many people who cannot handle intimacy, they express it in so many gestures, tokens, words, and games; and this works too, to a degree. Many people can gain some touches of intimacy from the roles of life, for this is safer, and we are not touched by the real risks. If somebody rejects me, they did not reject the me-myself, but merely an aspect of me, a put on, something that I might as well reject—see?—and now I’m unscathed. But when somebody sees an intimate part of us, beautiful or ugly, and condemns us, that person we hate, and always will, whatever polite veneers we put over it.

            Gestures, small talk, politeness, it seems like so much pond water. Nobody deep can handle it; they are confused. And yet the social gliders and charismatics shine in such an environment, and can amass millions to love them. Slogans too can harness much social energy, and let those who are willing to give up freedom for formulaic intimacy pour their hearts out. Thus we have world religions, who count their numbers as an argument for them, rather than against; thus we have best-selling authors, who a tasteful reader won’t even glance at. What is deep and intimate and real, difficult, brilliant, and ingenious, requires great intimacy and yet great power – thus, great control between the two – and those who can grasp it are rare.

            For us the sensitive, the world is more real to us, and thus we prefer hidden places, and know also how to structure the mind and face to block out any unwanted touch from the world. A touch is too much for us, so we hold back, and are called introverted or eccentric, or moody, or weird. We are not the successful, but our achievements are not the achievements of roles which were given opportunities, but a self and a me that needs no opportunity. We are the heart of the world. What others won’t feel fully, we can teach them to feel in part. The divine class of poets, thinkers, teachers, and innovators, the saints of the world, are from our stock. Many of us are mad, some unhappy, and yet the innermost joy of authenticity beats in all our hearts.

 

"circuit boards" an essay

This is a rough draft of an essay that is advancing certain metaphysical ideas I’ve been thinking about for years. I have some fresh perspectives on pan-psychism; some new theories about group consciousness; and best of all, a few stronger metaphors to more fully explore what I mean about the “engines” that set habits in order.

 

 

            Circuit Boards

 

                The needs, turned into instincts, then tweaked into desires, either increase or decrease actively, with no provocation except the passing of time, or reactively, in response to circumstances in the environment: whatever happens in the world, we will grow more and more hungry, will get lonely, will get bored with time, but certain needs, like the need for a job, or the need to escape a fire, depend on external circumstances. More often, the active needs are interpreted to fit circumstance. We need love, and the complications of a trusting give and take relationship, but this can be interpreted into the world in many ways, and though all people share this need in its raw form, none of us fulfill it the same way. Needs are interpreted to fit circumstance: education allows this interpretation, culture allows this fit.

            There is more emotion then can be put into motion. The excess is crystallized into language. Language acts primarily to inspire desire in others, and yet language is more rich than action, and the language of fantasy and poetry incites more feeling than action. Language not only pleases the tongue that speaks it, merely by speaking it, but also the ears that hear it, merely by hearing it; words are also the sauce of muscle, making every action tastier by the salt of anticipation, the pepper of deep intentions, and the subtle pinches of ambiguous emotions. Ambiguity is freedom. With ambiguity, either actual or imagined, we can interpret more freely, and let the energy of each need find its correct outlet. The metaphorical mind can swerve the burst of energy, so that a madman in his fury is merely a genius lacking the handholds on the helm. Emotional overflow writes great poetry only when the wit of a strong ego can force those emotions to sit pretty.

            Words stand for things. But even when the don’t stand for things, their emptiness gives them potential. There is no God. And yet believing in God has changed the lives of billions. God, or Reason, or the State, or Eternity, or the Tao, are all equally interchangeable. They are each specific prejudices about what can fill the place holder of The Name of Highest Importance. This Name is merely “the greatest existing thing we can imagine” – it need not really exist. Names can inflate infinitely, for infinity is a positive and finite feeling we have when the right religious cues evoke it.

            The habits direct the energy of the needs into their right outlet in the body, and the body speaks and acts it into the world. This interface is a sort of circuit board. The various energies of the needs, forced into instincts and then smoothed into desires, are crossed mixed, and finally interpreted into the world. In this way, all our energies are like the winds, waters, and seasons of earth.

            This book, the Idius has been me foreworld for ten years, where I master emotions and excess of emotion through crystals of ideas. It is so many strategies for living in the world. It is like a visual control panel for my circuit board. For most others, this same process goes on through a Religion, and the faith acts like a mental and emotional hygiene. Emotions are called “Sin” or “guilt” or “attachment” – really it doesn’t matter what the name, just so that the excesses can be crammed into them, and they handled in an effective manner. For this reason, a man and prison can improve his life no matter what religion the opportunists proselytize to him.

            The overpraise of The Name cures a few excesses. The literary critic Harold Bloom stands again for the Jewish habit of overpraising a few things. He idolized Shakespeare, and idolized Yahweh, David, and Freud, more so than was keen for an honest literary critic, but also Cervantes and Emerson, to keep him more balanced then most. Yet his peculiar absurdity is to speak in hyperboles or not at all.

            All energies become commodities when the leave the body. Sex can be a commodity of a good sort, between romantic lovers, or of a commercial sort, with prostitution; but intimacy is also a commodity, and a psychologist can ascribe to any of dozens of models of the mind, and improve the patient, so long as he listens.

            The energies, when tied up, can weaken the system. In such cases, we might become depressed to weaken the flow of energy, and anxious, to hold it in place. Since language is made out of desire, it can act like magic if it is spoken correctly. It was Emerson’s mission to write a new Bible for the world – and indeed between his essays and Whitman’s poems we have it! – only be reading nature first hand. For him nature was a trope fountain: by making analogies from science and nature, we can understand our own nature. But this is merely interpretation, and it could be either nature, or myths, or even a laid out deck of cards, that allow us to see inwards. Seeing the inner is guess work seeking confirmation. The unconscious can be made to fit with any mental map, given that your interpretation skills are keen, for the unconscious takes the image of the conscious: we internalize our tools. The technology we act with becomes the unconscious we think by.

            And since the group is also one mind and one body, it too holds needs, moving through us, each of us acting like a neuron. Even the prisoner in jail pays his debt to society by being to us that man a prisoner in jail. Since we each internalize all those we think about, and we thus move our energy through our image of their mind and their heart, we participate in them, and can regulate our own emotions through the idea of them. Every man in England is a king when he considers the Crown. The gaudy rich stir more than envy and admiration: they feed our fantasy life.

            And thus the whole world moves by necessity. The whole world has needs. Wars, and struggles, and destruction are as necessary as charities and art – for even if tomorrow makes them unnecessary, it could not have without today.

            The cell who is exhausted for the sake of the body has died, and it would be rightfully angry to be so used. But the body cannot always be empathetic to the cell, for it must put its own needs first. The hierarchy of needs, the power struggle and love embrace between them, makes and moves history.

            And again, in this way, that fictional characters such as God and the gods have existence and think through us, even despite of us, though we created them. For the same energy that moves through us, though meaning one private thing to us, means something else to the greater body which contains us. Just as a muscle cell would consider itself free and autonomous, moving in response to its own environment, feeling its own feelings, it does not know that we are playing tennis with it for our own pleasure. And the game of tennis is helping direct emotions and opinions of society at large, keeping us in the right mood and physique to do our jobs, manage our family, fulfill our duties, and maintain our sanity. And the institution of tennis itself, fulfilling these needs and more, stands again for a philosophy of games and sports that is ancient, and by no means a light matter.

            The self of a man is his needs. His full self extends beyond his mind and body, to include his prized possessions, primarily – “the clothes make the man” – but to include really anything he influences. He puts himself into others, and to some degree holds copyright on it. In this way, we have circles of friends, a close circle, a middle circle, and an outer circle, each fulfilling its own needs. And further, we have an array of family and friends that not only necessitate each other (since I had a father like this, I now choose to have a friend like that), but also balance each other through you. Emotions must flow, but if you are blocked or inadequate to them, friends can stand for them, can feel pain for you, can cry for you, can live for you, and can die for you. Thus you may judge a man by his friends, if only you understand large ideas and complex things. But you cannot judge a man as being of the same character as his friends.

            In this way, with a mind that is pouring energy in different directions, in such a little space as the brain – and here we must assume that information itself is conscious and emotes – we move and rock the entire world. We voyeuristically and passively absorb thousands of stories daily, from television, literature, and from the never ending gossip of daily life. Balance this against the spontaneous and often unconscious fantasy life of the individual – unconscious not because we are guilty to see it, but because it is mostly irrelevant to the direct demands of daily life. And yet when these stories appear before us, coincidentally in books, movies, or stories from others, we recognize them as our own, without even having consciously thought them before.

            Literary criticism may be the ultimate human science, because memory is shaped as stories, and all the sciences work through memory and the experiences that made them. Stories themselves must be beautiful and interesting, but that is no science in itself. Criticism is stories of stories, but always be stated or implied assumptions, that is, by a philosophy, and a philosophy implies a standard of values and a method for applying it.

            Cause and effect can be absolute and yet leave space for freedom. Though x causes y, there are many modes and styles of this causation. The world is determined by necessity, yet pliable to will.

            In the same way, since we internalize dozens of roles in our head through education, we can’t help but placing ourselves somewhere among these roles. Though a man may be great in his time, in another time, he could not see himself that way, being unequal to the roles put before him: the medicine man place into New York City will feel himself to be bizarre. And yet a man marked for greatness will be great whatever society he is born into, for he will internalize whatever roles there are, and find a way to place himself above them. Place an Emerson here or there, he will always be eloquent; put Socrates in Egypt or China, he will still be a brilliant gadfly.

            We internalize roles, and of course take on many roles throughout life, many at the same time: I can be father, brother, husband, worker, writer, Christian, neighbor, etc., all at once, and I can evaluate myself on how I fit each of them, as a good father but a bad worker, as a good lover but bad Christian, and sometimes the virtues of one role fulfills the other role too: being  a good atheist I may therefore be a good neighbor and a good worker; and yet all these roles, or what I call “personas-for” are masked we press the face of the I into, and the I has no face until a mask gives it form.

            The roles are internalized by the engines of habit, which I spoke of in another place, and so they bend the desires, emotions, and energies into direct shapes. Once a man becomes a police officer, he thinks like a police officer, he can’t help it, even though he gives it style, and may yet be a crooked officer, or a good one, etc. The I moves under the mask, and yet the mask cannot be broken. It is amazing to me that a man can fit so many roles, do so many layers of activities at all times, take on so many burdens and duties, and yet have his mind be open and carefree, he might even sing at work and laugh with his children: for the unconscious mind is no weird Id, but a powerful life-structuring tool.

            The consciousness, which is the least part of the brain, is also the most important, being the free part, that which feels itself to be free. The feeling of freedom itself justifies all the praises we have for freedom, and the feeling of freedom is only an experience in relationship to fear and pain. For power and freedom are allied, and grow the from the pain of fear.

            All emotions must be expressed: directly, or indirectly, fully, or subtly, baldly, or masked. Every twitch of the body is an expression, and every twitch of society is an expression too. If a new how to read anything – impossible because he is not everything, but only a man – he could take any set of data, such as tomato production statistics, or crime rates, and know how it fits in with the bigger whole. But each man is yet omniscient: he knows everything he needs to know in this life, and holds the tools for finding out more.

            All things are known by somebody or something, but nobody save the universe as a whole knows the All, though she too learns, and listens to the wisdom of each of her children. The poetry of the crawling ant is unknown to the man who merely counts the number of instinctual movements each ant is born with. And yet empathy is possible. Emerson recommended using nature as a trope fountain, and writing a new bible from it. I recommend interpreting everything your eyes fall upon, and learning to find many uses for the same old thing. Science will yet discover many wonders, and yet the basic cognitive tools of science have been around since before man. Wisdom is ancient, and man has always been sapient. And the highest truth in the world is the one you discover alone.

 

"your own" a poem

Your own

 

The march of tradition

Lacks wings to your heaven.

The mud of your birth-

Name will plough into earth.

The god of your fathers

Is the bauble of toddlers

And the land of your mothers

Is the coddling of crawlers.

 

But, the fresh from your hand

Will stand tower

And glower at death and maid fate

And sing the breath

Of your hidden name,

Harvest the best of your sweat

And scratch the sky of eternity

With your last luscious palace.

 

autobiographical sketch, "my style"

My Style

Between I and eyes

Hums the workshop

Of my garden study

 

Winged words

From heat and fever

Spring from the boldstar ruddy

 

Bent my glance,

Broke my care

I dance this field alone

 

My writing pours

Image of

Antechamber song.

 

Style and personality are the same thing – identity of expression. The style of expression is determined by the shapes of a person’s focus. Behind the screen of the world is the antechamber between I and eyes, the workstation of the mind. The way thoughts move through this mind determine also how we will think and talk.

            This is the real world of the person, the external world is the screen we throw it upon. The manner of the focus determines how the world and ideas will be realized: this is where reality is made.

            My style, which I hear often is a difficult one, has been informed by a few incidents in my life, building upon the naturally predispositions of my birth. As a baby I desired to be held constantly, and yet I would let nobody feed me but myself. This bifurcation between the need for affection and the demand for autonomy became the crux of my personality. With my parent’s divorce at age six, I bewailed that I “wasn’t daddy’s son anymore” and hence after stood aloof from parental affection, and finally from the affection from friends, since I preferred to hunt insects in the ditch and spend time alone.

            The feeling that I was different from other kids, and so could not be close to them, may in itself have been the only real difference between me and them. But I started into books early, into fantasy novels, and I loved monsters and creatures of all sorts. I wished to be a writer like Piers Anthony, who wrote adolescent fantasies. In fifth grade I wished to write an epic wherein the monsters of Greek myth overthrew Olympus.

            The feeling of being something monstrous explained to me why my father left and I could never get close to other kids, and yet the desire to prove myself superior to them, and prove they were at fault for excluding me, budded finally into a bald ambition for greatness.

            Moving schools a few times seperated me from the friends I’ve made, and isolated me from making new friends. But I kept old friends as penpals, and explored my style through experiments and games in letters. At one point I was writing five letters a week; and I considered myself writer bound. I started writing verse, and impressed my teachers.

            Being bullied in middle school accentuated the feeling of being different, of something being wrong with me. After a year I beat up my bully, but I had no friends to share the victory with. But I had determined not to live in fear.

            Poetry in highschool helped transmute the angst and loneliness. The ambition to be great sought expression in my studies, in tennis, and in playing guitar, never with steller success. The original dynamo between independence and affection had become a desire for greatness and a feeling of being different from others, and being unable to get close to them.

            When I had my bipolar breakdown at age 17, I humiliated myself and lost my friends. Now the feeling of being different from others was irrevocably finalized. With the manic passions, which burst like flash floods, I had to use my mind to stabalize myself. My mother said I became a philosopher overnight. I was constantly trying to figure out my heart, my feelings, my thoughts, books, friends, the world, it became my fulltime occupation.

            Thus the original crux of my childhood between intamcy and independence became exacerbated as passion and intellectualism. My mind became categorical: I wished to discover patterns in all things. At 18 I decided to write a perfect book, which later returned as the Idius. At first it was to summarize my religious beliefs as a Christian, but finally I outgrew that. Later with the help of Mortimer Adler, I aimed to make a Great book, and with bipolar, I became grandiose and wished to replace the Bible.

            The graph I composed at 17, the “map of the universe,” the founding idea of the idius, and this before the breakdown, became the archetype for my new manner of thinking.

            Now all the after-class discussions with teachers about my views on the subject were coming to the fore. I began to read exclusively nonfiction, though I became an English major, ostensibley “to learn how to write” since I had no concept of a career on the other side. An immersion in Nietzsche, first, and Emerson, later, became my great influences, with Emerson teaching me what I now know must be my next step in style change. I call him my literary father.

            I live in a world of private abstractions, and do not feel comfortable about anything I do not have a personal theory about. I like to map out patterns, and so my style is abstract, and yet that passionate intimate poetry, which I had loved before, breaks through, with the sheer love of language and words. I hate any theory that I can’t reclaim as my own, and distrust anybody else’s ideas if I can’t see for myself how they are true.

            The bridge between passionate overflow and intellectual abstractness I wish to replace with a rhetoric that offers illustrations, examples, sensual images, shown ideas rather than merely told, quotes and quotations, anecdotes, and many demonstrations set in parralel instance. This is “the human element” I find lacking in my thinking. I hardly think of people at all, unless to theorize their motives. And yet that passion for intimacy remains. I shall try for exact metaphors spun in countless examples. The heart and mind I have, but the personal and practical I have not. I have not mastered my lips nor my hands, only my mind have I developed, and my heart was always her own monster.

 

"Song for the Sick" a poem

Now that my body aches daily from my job in the warehouse, I have contemplated death and dying, suffering and despair. So I wrote a poem!

 

 

 

Song for the Sick

 

Men love life

Though all will die

So I love you,

Though you may leave.

 

Work, wealth, clothes, and home

Require daily effort

Work, wealth, clothes, and home

Are readily lost.

 

The body grows old

The body grows ill

The fair face of youth

Becomes masked in age

The innocent brow

Wrinkles in worry

The sharpest of eyes

Grows dull and squinted.

 

Those whom you trust

Sometimes betray you

Those whom you desire

Never give you enough

 

Write your heart out

Nobody will understand

Speak yourself hoarse

They will smile and look away.

 

Dream of new lovers

Hope for better jobs

Long for fresh friends

But don’t gain them!

Or they shall wilt like the rest

And then you can’t even dream.

 

Best friends grow distant

Favorite songs grow tedious

Those we love grow ill and die

As we ourselves will – in suffering.

 

Some pray to God for heaven

Some meditate alone for Nirvana

Some make peace with death and relax

This is not my wisdom.

 

I love you as something I don’t own

Kiss you as something I can’t hold

Adore you as something I can’t keep.

 

I commit myself to inconstance

And trust in uneven things

 

But true wisdom,

Is to love what I am, for I am always that

To enjoy what I do, for doing is life.

To treasure my centermost

And love best what is nearest and ever in me.

Creative flow is my life.

 

"as you work" a poem

Here is a poem I wrote while working today. You can hear the inspiration of the Tao in it!

 

 

As you work

 

Stand Perfect

Walk with flow.

Square your life

And draw a circle

On chaos.

 

Look upon people

As your children

Touch all things

As your mother.

 

Eyes on purpose

Earn the prize

Hands active

Improve all you touch.

 

Therefore,

Regard yourself as

God of this world

Be the center of goodness

And the sun of fine things.

 

 

"knots" an essay

Here is an essay I’ve been writing for a week. It is difficult, but if you grasp it you will see where I’ve been for a long time. I entitle it “knots” because it is knotting together a lot of different ideas I’ve been living with for perhaps a year.

 

 

 

Knots

Love disappoints. Hope, ambition, family, all things disappoint. But what do disappointments matter when we have our own private world, the only thing real to us, the one place we go to feel fully free and happy? Ultimately, that free and happy place must come from within, a fruit of the self, offspring of the innermost. Only in expressing the innermost, in putting out something personal, of making the transition, can one find an eternal source of joy. For maturity means knowing how to be content in all situations. Master your focus, realize only the best realities, care most for the happiest things. Learn from the stoics: don’t care about life’s inevitable sufferings; attending to them increases them. For happiness in life does not depend upon types of circumstance, but upon style of focus. This fulfills.

            Fulfillment is for needs. To grope with metaphysics, needs could be viewed as an energy within a void. Mythologically, the needs separated from the mind when an atomic self identified with a body, when the body resonated with the same energy of the atom. A body has unity through its needs; the mind breaks this unity by growing. Needs are not merely the emptiness within a body, for at the center of that is a tight energy that stylizes how that emptiness will be filled, and colors motivational energy it creates. Mind, however, holds its energy on the circumference, in a sphincter like ring, keeping its void in the center. To press an idea into the void, to constrict focus, brings it into the body.

            The summoning power of a resonating system sets the needs to draw energy from the system and direct it towards needed goals. But the ambitions of the mind are free, and the energy of the mind is free; it seeks what it will, and its health therefore lies in activity.

            As needs must filter energy into a shape, mind too summons an idea by taking on a shape, and so also acts as a filter. The freedom of the mind is in moving the energy in neurons within the realm of its possibilities. As habits incarnate in nerve structures, the mind is limited by the brain it acts through, since it acts upon the brain and its possibilities.

            The needs provide a style of self: its freedom is in being itself. The mind however has no absolute self, and its freedom is in moving. It functions to enact emotions.

            Creativity too is an emotion. We desire to add style to reality. Creativity is a means of balancing unused emotions, of letting the moods and feelings flow out into the world. Thus the original energy of needs blooms.

            Needs become real through pains and pleasures. This energy is mingled as desire, love and fear. These desires intermingle around shapes, and charge our images so they react with the mind to either center themselves in it, or push other objects out of focus. The mind in turn can either focus or release. This basic dichotomy permeates the whole system.

            This does not make a neat category of opposites. For though love is habitual pleasure, and fear habitual pain, love brings pain when the beloved is distant, and fear brings pleasure when the feared is distant. The fruits of fear are cowardice and weakness when mind doesn’t master it, but when mind does master fear, we achieve truth, power, and authority. And even fear can grant the power to create a beauty to love.

            Beauty shuts the critical eye: she will be taken whole. Only beauty can be loved, only power can be respected. Though a strong analytical eye is required to expand the scope of the eye, to be able to subordinate more pieces under one whole, the apprehension of beauty is a release from analysis and criticism. Much work goes into love, and love requires much work – yet they are opposites. Beauty, the object of love, requires power to see.  Strangeness is an unassimilated figure, before it can be experienced as beautiful or ugly. Great art remain ever strange, like a fountain. And the strangeness that is the innermost is never opened up – each man is farthest form himself. Love and fear optimize in the wise man, the man who learns the best of his culture, and adds to it.

            The structure of wisdom is illustrated thus:

Symbols

Myth

Commentary

Philosophy

Values

 

            A table of values founds the arguments of philosophy, commentary applies these to life and its stories, the myths we live by, and these present themselves in paintings, words, and other symbols that epitomize the full experience.

            Commentary is stories about stories, and chooses a few stories as central. This it must have already selected the table of values it wishes to prove through interpretation. The logic of a philosophy is the style of identifying concepts together to justify a table of values; but a philosophy is a story about ideas, a myth a story about people, and commentary a bridge between them.

            All commentary is based on the interpretive key, a basic method by which we use our stories to explain the rest of the world of stories. This is familiar in Freudianism, which sought to explain psychology through the Oedipus complex and castration anxiety. The two basic stories are used to explain all others. Christianity also knows only two stories: the fall and the sacrifice.

            All theologies and criticism are interchangeable. The basic position are a sort of map. The place of the most important element is interchangeable, and yet the place is always filled by something. The agent of the system, the logic of the system, the are called by different names but mean the same things. A neutral map could describe all worldviews, philosophies, and religions.

            Theology is mode of commentary on certain religious myths. Theology and commentary can be interesting and reveal beauty that was not before seen. They are styles for sorting through stories. Interpretive methods are therefore neither true nor false; they are either fruitful or barren. We need constant stories, and the key to grasping them.

            Myths and stories set the pace of life. Life is a poem, and mankind is paced. As you must read a long time to be hypnotized, so too does a group, company, or friend take an effort to internalize and gain the tempo. This persona-of the business company holds a pace and attitude. These are the energy that resonates through a group body.

            Here we come again to the distinction between style and substance, between manner and matter. It takes some time to pace yourself to a book; you must reread the first paragraph a few times, or plunge in and imitate the pace and cadence. You will become hypnotized, for reading is a trance. The style presents an attitude of the body that you as the individual internalize, and experience either disfavorably, balancing it with your own disapproval, or which you identify with, empathizing with approval. Whichever, the other’s attitude is internalized within you.

            Each member shares the group attitude, even if he rebels against it. A family shares a spirit; since they conspire together, they feel with one heart, and the persistent emotions move the others most. The greatest passion works strongest. As passion is a persistent focus, and passion is made of willed tensions, this creates an anticipation which grants a greater release.

            Needs become real as pleasures and pains around imagined objects. Each of our basic myths, or life stories, we imagine for ourselves, is daily edited with thousands of conscious and unconscious fantasies of what we desire, and handles the frustrations of daily life. Every pain balances itself with a little story. In this way, our emotions and desires constantly balance and complicate themselves. Fantasies balance life. Only in this way can we persist in our work, and persist in love.

            Work and love fulfill life; they are opposites and yet they intermingle. Just as work without mind becomes boring, and without habits becomes stressful, all opposites must intermingle. Pleasure and pain become desires.   Fear and love intermingle into shapes. The effort and release of mind becomes thought. And thought is felt in the body.

            Emotions are felt in the muscles, and thinking is always somatized. To do a job, to make love, you must be in the right mindset. A mindset is actually a muscle stance. When a man is ready to write an essay, and sits down, his jaw is set, his eyes get a faraway look; he does his chores and manages his affairs as if he were the world were a fading vapor. But this requires manic preparation.

            Just as in astrogenesis, biogenesis, and evolution so too in culture, religion, and technology: creativity comes from a surplus of ideas. The great inventor Edison and the great speaker Emerson kept hundreds of notebooks produced by constant thought. In complexity, ideas resonate together and become one body. Easy pleasures make fat and sick; difficult pleasures make supple and strong: we must increase how much we can think at a time, and allow ourselves to stay in that mindset.

            A state of mind lasts for months, a passion for weeks, a mood for days, and feelings for moments. The little fantasies we tell to tie our moods down must allow us to persist in a goal. Just as rewriting is the most important part of writing, so constantly recombining of ideas is the most important part of thinking. A set mood allows this to persist. The energy for moods comes from habits, and the fountain of needs.

            The needs can be imagined as a set of vesicles expanding and constricting to create shapes of energy which seek their object. An expanded needs hurts, but an expanded mind pleases. Yet the pain of needs centers focus on itself, like an obsession, like the tongue that returns to the sick tooth. Pain must be bound. Fantasies bind pains and frustrations into certain muscles, gestures, and expressions. Just as creativity is able to restructure a pain so as to satisfy the need, so a metaphorical mind that tells a lot of stories can find outlets others don’t see. The shorter strings of moment-by-moment fantasy hold the larger threads together.

            Work and love fulfill life. We need to be important, we need to be loved. Yet when these are frustrated, we can tightly bind the erratic unwilled focus of pain and let the mind feel the smooth unwilled nonfocus of pleasure. To tightly bind an anxiety allows us to turn it solid, to turn it into a tool.

            Sensations themselves are like anxieties, but they are more tightly bound, till the erratic element is lost. And just as needs hold the shape of the energy they created, and won’t collapse into pleasure until the energy is put into the needed object, so does an interpretive mind know how to change energy to plug it into the right outlet.

            The mindset of a focus holds to one purpose – using the eyes of intellect and the mouth of desire to hold a pose – and this allows the right stories to fill in the gaps of life. The conceptual mind is based on the imagination, and even when we aren’t literally imagining ideas, still those invisible concepts holds shape.

            Passion is a persistent focus. The focus that releases is the focus that receives. And so each person can only be loved as much as he allows, as much as he is able and willing to allow. What is the limit of desire? What is its asymptote?

            Moby Dick is about discovering an asymptotical meridian and throwing your life against it. Pure love and pure fear are impossible, for they compound each other. When an asymptotical objects springs to life, we must either swallow it or kill it. Through these affinities and hates, the world is structured like a great rolling plain of gravities and fictions where each of us rolls into his best possible place. Yet most of this is unconscious. A strong emotion would destroy the integrity of consciousness, so the emotion is plunged under and allowed up in manageable dosages.

            Love frees, and truth empowers – the truth cannot set you free, for freedom makes truth, and truth sets you working: only beauty frees. Beauty, the only object of love, exists in many layers. The surface structure leads to the deep structure. But the deep structure of an art form may never be fully explicated. The deeper the art the greater. The deeper structure lies in definite but elusive implications.

            Persons themselves are the most beautiful of objects, and though the are complicated, each of us readily internalizes others. We have archetypes for what a person is. We have no innate ideas but we do have innate methods for making ideas. The making of images, ideas, and stories is all a sort of language.

And so language is the shape emotions take before they become thinkable. We answer the same primordial needs that all men do, but with our own conventional language. The group body fulfills its needs voyueristically through certain persons representing a certain drive. The gratuitously wealthy man satisfies all our avarice. The madman goes crazy so we don’t have to.

And thus certain people act like objects, and objects are also words, gestures are words, all actions have a layer of gesture to them.