"energizing yourself" an essay

A long essay, yes, and inspired and beauty, among my better. For those of you who talk to me regularly, you will recognize your own ideas that you gave me. The idea is about how to energize yourself to do all the things you must do in life – but especially how to find inspiration for the great things each of us are called to achieve.

 

Daniel Christopher June

 

Energizing yourself

 

               

Ama my diaphanous muse,

be warm as wax and melt for me!

 

                Life is prickers and poison ivy; when we follow our own path, we must walk through briars and wrath. Our whim, our wont, is the commanding voice of our outer will, who sometimes kisses us like the sun, and sometime flits away like a will-o-the-wisps. Life is suffering. Yes, but life is also beatitude. When we are ready, we will declare with irreconcilable certainty: I choose to be happy. The emotions must cycle and cycle to allow an idea to emerge; the sorrow must turn like the blood of Uranus in the oceans, again as foam over the sea, till the shell of Love reveals Aphrodite. And so I choose to be happy, to embrace fate and befriend circumstance, and cease to pout and beg the world to accommodate me. In all my grief, I can say with pride: I can still write.

                What I can do is al l that concerns me; what I can control is my universe of strength. My will is shepherd of my thoughts. Every stray lamb is gentled back again. The outer I, or the freedom of will, the conduit of fate, is a habit of thinking that gives voice to our importance, our calling, our purpose. This will to is like an arrow on the brow, guiding the eyes of our mind to that one place we should be. It is pure habit, and put into place be the principles of habit: constant practice and every mode of reinforcement. Perhaps a solid life trauma or religious experience is necessary to lay this habit deep into our mind.

                Religions give us divine eyes to see our experience, philosophy gives us the eyes of reason: they are all artificial habits that may have no external correlate, nor need they meet one. The most popular religions include the streamlined moral systems of Christianity and Buddhism.

                Christianity and Buddhism are similar in that they both simplify and epitomize the complexity of their parent religion. Hinduism and Judaism are far richer, subtler, and more complex than their popular offspring, and therefore, they market worse. One central idea to Christianity and Buddhism is the moral imperative to commit suicide: and both recommend this as the highest good of life. Buddhism says there is no self, Christianity says the self is sinful and must be sacrificed to God. Is the self so wretched, after all? Are not all stories, stories about selves? And stories are interesting for that same reason. Stories are about people, their minds, their emotions, their “egos,” their desires – and that’s why we can’t get enough of them. We care about those sorts of things. The recommendation that we not care about those things, things that are built into our psychology to care about, could only come from an ascetic urge for spiritual distinction. Ditto the idea that we should “annul the ego.” There could be no natural desire to annul the ego and what it stands for, unless one wished to promote and advertise some spiritual triumph. Such a triumph, or any desire for one, would be impossible without the motivation of the very same ego in question, thus leaving the project paradoxical if not downright hypocritical. With Christianity, the fantasy of suicide comes from a sense of personal unworthiness – and such an emotional prejudice comes from the widespread malady of depression, and especially a depression that resents those who are happy and not at all depressed, who are later called “the proud.” With Buddhism, the fantasy of suicide comes from a sense of the unworthiness of life in general – and such an emotional prejudice comes from the widespread malady of anxiety, and especially an anxiety that resents those who are cheerful and not at all anxious, who are later called “the ignorant.”

                The body is the lens of the mind. The ego is the interface between body and mind, and no system ought to annul it, indeed cannot, short of literal suicide, and so metaphysical ideals are not literal, should not be actually sought, but only sought the way the moth chases the moon, as a distant guidepost that, if ever approached directly, would kill the moth.

                The body’s energy, its motivation, is inspired by and exists for human needs: memories are the hollow walls which each fill with a unique flavor of motivation, a differentiated energy, that can be swallowed only by the appropriate tongue, to expend into the proper deed. Ideas act both as centers of emotional energy, and that emotional energy, or desire, surrounds that idea and pushes it into our out of immediate focus, such as when you desire to drink, and the image of a cup of water is pushed into your immediate focus and out again. In this case, desires are charges around objects, and move them into and out of focus. The ideas themselves are made of more tightly wrapped energy that can in turn be released with that idea is analyzed. Certain ideas work as conduits of energy transferring it from one object to another. This network of energy makes information interesting, by making energy move from the needed object to the analogous object.

                Ideas as conduits structure energy. Certain concepts and especially metaphysical concepts exist primarily to manage moods, and need not refer to any outer reality. God, Heaven, Nirvana, Karma, have meaning only as to how they make us feel. Lacking that, they have no purpose, use, or scientific value. Knowing human needs, we could have predicted that we would invent them, though we prefer to say we “discovered them” or that they were “revealed” to us. Looking at a primitive man, we would be able to see what ideal objects he would make over the millennia. What is the “supernatural,” pragmatically? Supernatural objects posit truth claims beyond criticism. Every system makes assumptions out of bounds of doubt. Those who tell stories of a higher intelligence wish the authority of a higher intelligence, one that has the right to recommend and even demand our interest and obedience. The entire value of the supernatural is to orient the natural, to lay a framework which doubt and science are forbidden to touch. This is called “sacred.”

                Dreams, daydreams, and even the imagination which accompanies a set narrative, are so influenced by desire as to flow and shift without set anchors. A few anchors, preferably sensual and immediate, must keep the dream in place. The best symbols are physical: they can be hoisted against doubt. And so our stories of Greece and Egypt must hold onto a few pieces of stone and pottery, which act as the living body of ancient Greece, and the full history is merely the spirit surrounded those broken bones and shards.

                All supernatural realities, included the stories and myths we hear of the gods or the afterlife or fables with morals, stand for metaphysical concepts, and they form the pipes and lines of an integrated economy: they exist to channel motivation. The adherents to any religion may collectively share contrary and dissimilar goals, and yet their methods for processing their motivation will be similar, since they have each internalized a similar ordering principle, or an engine for putting energy in order, and into and out of conscious awareness.

                How is the philosopher different? For the philosopher, the true ideas are the perennial questions. These questions are the active ingredients of all philosophy, and are the greatest gifts she has bestowed upon us. The various methods for answering them are her second boon; the structures of her systems the third, and the defined terms that result, a distant fourth. “God” and “Heaven” would, for the philosopher, be in the fourth category. For him, the ability to formulate a method is the greatest glory. He will cheerfully warn that “the simple answers are almost always wrong. It requires centuries to reduce a complex correct answer to simplicity,” and he is correct. Our collective minds must cycle over the same ideas for generations until a few hearty proverbs can epitomize them, a few pithy stories, to inspire the rest. Beauty must be reduced to truth, and truth must reincarnate as beauty again.

                Art as an “end in itself” is a terrifying idea, and leads to terrifying results, experiments in exploring the limits of the medium of the genre – abortions and demons as cautionary tales against excessive innovation. The child is stupefied, and the angels cringe. And yet the gross excess of each generation is quickly lost into the blissful ignorance of history, and we focus instead on epitomes of beauty.

                Yes, religions and philosophies make circuits and channels for our passions, but beauty is the seducer and beauty the inspirer: truth must use beauty to win his goal. Lacking this, suicide is preferable.

                How do we find motivation? How do we get the energy we need to create a beautiful life, and live it beautifully? Discipline digs the wells; inspiration fills them. We must do the things we hate to do until we love to do them. Or lacking that, we will have still hollowed out a cavern for some sort of energy to fill.

                Motivation is a problem. What I want I must not really want, since I do not work to gain it. And what I do achieve in this world, even if I lament it, is in fact the true to my heart, because that is what I was willing and able to achieve. All problems are intellectual problems, and the first step in solving them is to set each stray emotion in its correct circuit. In this way, the tapestry becomes whole, and we can see the problem for what it is. Thinking requires constant input of unique materials. The mind too must eat and sleep. We must try new things and slowly learn to love what is lovely.

                I am slow to love and slower to cease to love. I could only give me full heart to a few good things. Some people wish to master God. They call this “obeying God” not realizing that god is an idea fully owned within their own mind; and imagine their relationship is with an external being. But lacking that, the outcome is the same; the idea has been made to mean everything, a panacea and all-goal for them, so that all questions are answered by the same term. And since ideas are objects, and since handling objects is a skill, they can, after years, master God and become artists of God – with results varying as much as they do among religious folk.

                For others the idea to master is “love” – and here the idea of love is different from the feeling of love, since the feeling is a mere experience, whereas the idea of love can be a complex framework that orders the other passions and the mind to do a wide assortment of functions. God, love, and whatever else, are mere idols, symbolic images to dissolve various experiences into a single menstruum. For what is better to own, a hundred tools that can perform one function, or one tool that can perform a hundred functions? For a guitarist, the instrument serves as a vehicle for expressing his emotions, for making his emotions objects for others to share, for making a living perhaps, for entertaining others. The instrument is a basic entity, not very much at all. It is a mere medium, but for the man who loves that medium, it comes to stand for all things, as an interface between self and world. Each person’s calling is epitomized in a similar bit of matter, or, in the case for the more abstract, in an instrumental concept.

                Motivation, therefore, will be structured to bring energy into a few basic ideas. All the conduits, pipelines, and pressure valves will be to empower our instruments of choice. This frugality of means is the best chance of mastery, and with mastery comes grace and pride. When one can mingle love and power into passion, then he will atone the heart and mind, and set them working to the same goals.

                The circuits of emotions require simple balances. Anxieties seize up energy and depress the system, and this in order to avoid a wrongful discharge of emotion. Such emergency tactics can be avoided if we know how to use metaphors as conduits to express intense emotions with a better outlet. Some sort of pressure gauge will allow a steady stream of motivation, rather than an abrupt and overwhelming discharge.

                The difficulty with procrastination, for instance, comes from the habit of lacking the motivation to accomplish a duty until an impending due date inspires enough panic to motivate a full-scale discharge of action. What if we accomplished our duty the first day it was assigned, got it done with the same burst of energy, and then spend the subsequent week until deadline relaxing? This is more difficult, because they burst of work at the end of the deadline has been fed a long stream of anxiety all along, which like an embolism was waiting to burst.

                All energy in our system is from the reserves. Even appetites for foods that are not needed for nutrition can build up. I recall getting sick of soda pop, and swearing off it for a year. Eventually, my sweet tooth led me to fruit juices, and I began mixing fruit juices for fun. Another year later, and I drank a soda and it hit me like a kiss to the lips, and I was in love with it – and drank them with more enjoyment then before. The experience can only be aesthetic, since any other need is lacking – sugar water is sugar water, juice or pop. And this sort of experience cycled through iced teas and finally coffee, for years now. I call these appetites that slowly build and then burst to be stays of energy, and I have a similar experience with certain foods, both specifically such as in hamburgers, which I am now sick of, and genres of food, such as Italian, which I now like; and certain authors are to my taste, and sometimes a new book just hits the spot and I am in heaven reading it, but other times a try a half dozen different new books and none of them please; and also with friends: when a certain person interests me and excites me, the energy is palpable, and that person wants to be around me as much as possible, because I am sort of in love with him or her, and she feels great, she feeds off that energy. But when suddenly my interest is back on writing poems or essays, the time spent with my friend becomes less important to her, but really to me, so that she makes excuses to do other things, when in fact I no longer dance with electricity when I see her. It is impossible to fake love where she is lacking, nor hide love where she is full. Every man or woman is seen for what they are, sooner or later; we can deceive others on some matters, but not all; there is too much truth in every breath we speak.

                The heart is a garden where every flower has her season, and every fruit its time. We can cultivate the garden and yet the moods and motivations can only come when they are ready.

                Differentiated energy becomes the passion of the moment. I have a hundred appetites and glut each when it is ripe; like a tree with myriad fruits, which I devour when the green is gone.

                Therefore, metaphors are the saviors of mankind. A metaphor is a conduit for a certain type of energy, a certain passion. It becomes clearer every day that the things we want the most in the universe do not exist: when we suffer, where is divine comfort? when we are wronged, where is divine justice? When we are lonely, where is our perfect mate? When we are successful, who will share in our success? Ideals are lies, and they exist only to tantalized. Grab the fruit but it eludes you. We require instead metaphorical substitutions. If God will not kiss my brow, I can imagine he will in the next life. This alone fulfills me, even if there is no afterlife. The metaphorical displacement of what I want into a hope or story itself fulfills.

                In this way, we need all sorts of metaphysical stories, stories about the universe as a whole, history as a whole, mankind as a whole, to set us into place. We need them, and yet they are not scientific, nor historical. We need lies with which to live.

                Not that we deceive ourselves. What we need must in some sense exist. Trusting our needs is the greatest of wisdom, the one nearest to the heart, truest to the individual. Nevertheless, the philosophical and religious needs can only be fulfilled through appealing fictions, and these must stand as most important to us, without any historical or scientific justification. This is the way the nonexistent supernatural motivates, inspires, and pleases the very existent natural: the supernatural is merely a point of view about the natural.

                And so we require certain metaphysical concepts to motivate us. The ideas of the outermost and the innermost are the limits of reality in my system. The Outermost is the All, the Innermost is the Self.

                The outer I, or the freedom of the will, acts as a conduit of fate, though a mere habit of thinking. It gives us our importance, our calling, our purpose.

                Human beings can also act as conduits of our emotions, to love the parts of us we cannot love. Your embrace runs circuits up my spine. We come to feel through the hearts of others, feel proud because father is proud of us, feel guilty because our son is failing. Because I need you so much, I hate you. I need you yet I find no satisfaction in what you give me. You pull away and leave. The more I need a friend, the better I am to stay alone. And so, men seek women whom they can control, and who control them in ways they cannot control themselves. It is as if our hands were always stitching the hearts of others, working over their systems, typing programs into their mind. Solitude is difficult, intimacy impossible, and so we exist in the middle, sometimes more alone, sometimes more intimate, but never does my soul converge with yours. That is a possibility for the afterlife.

                Your heart beats for mine, and mine for yours. Everybody runs at a metabolic rate, which can be corrected by exercise. The mind must dig wells which will only slowly fill and erupt. We live at a tempo and our juices and reserves fructify at a tempo. Resonance and tempo bring familiars into intimacy. Every city, every family, every business, moves at a tempo by which each member is measured and evaluated. The tempo of a man or woman in a society is their rate of thinking, influenced by their rate of speaking, hearing, and working.

                Each city works has a tempo, or series of tempos, such as the rate of traffic, business hours, legal proceedings, and the general pace of customer service, entertainment, etc. Each of us internalize the whole and evaluate ourselves in terms of this. Language moves thought like paddles through water, and so as we talk and listen, our mind stirs. Tempo of speech, tempo of movement requires an internal clock a habitual rate to set the mind’s processing. “The scholar, when he comes, will be known by an energy that will animate all who see him.”

                In this, and many other ways, society is like a network of pipes. We filter and pass ideas and emotions and even materials through each other. Money is moral. Money moves at a rate, and silently causes empires to grow and collapse. Ideas hold currency as well, and can be inflated or counterfeited just as money was. In money, ideas are symbolized.

                Ideas are put over materials. Symbols each evoke a series of realities, and have the power of evoking all these together. Every system, every set of stories, can be handled with a few bare symbols. Talk of the cross is enough to swing Christianity around by a chain. Talk of the Wheel does the trick for Hinduism. The symbol evokes a series of realities and reduces their complexity to a gesture. Symbols keep the idea reproducing in the minds of others, and limit what language can come out of that symbol.

                A group of persons or institutes are also representative, and stand for a series of ideas, symbolize those ideas, emanate them as a magnet with charge. The physical symbols is the body for the ideas it stands for.

                And so metaphysical ideas, being the widest, and most general, structure so much more of the living reality. Since metaphysical ideas represent more, they are more important, do more, are the great fruits of a million minds. Each man’s map of the universe orients him, points our eyes upon the right realities. Art functions only to arrest the senses and to seduce the mind to accept a value. Beyond this, it is mere entertainment and distraction.

                We only see the beauty that is sympathetic to our inner beauty. Sympathy does not need kindness or well-wishing – indeed the cruelest of hates could be from a sympathetic man – but sympathy means identifying with the experience of another. When a man or woman sees a certain child, or a certain poem, and tears come to his eye, his creative inner has been touched, like to like, and he feels the realities within that he has forgotten. Sympathy draws us together. That I am such and such on the inner, and resonate to all that is similar, means I am never alone in the universe, but that I have a well of energy deep within myself that will feed upon the contact and celebration of all things and all people of a like nature. Happiness motivates. And happiness requires the honest and magic statement: I deserve to be happy and in fact I am happy. Then our outermost will, the great God who is our own mind, will resonate and find his heaven in the system of our concepts. God is the edge of the private will, and we call her Universe.

                There are many celebrated ways to “recharge your soul,” and they range from praying, to meditating, to talking with friends, to reading one’s favorite author. Essentially, these activities reduce to recharging oneself by resonating to what he is sympathetic to. All fine art does this for a man: the art must not only be beautiful, but it must present his beauty, his own self image (“my face before I was conceived”). Just as a guitar string will spontaneously vibrate when the key of E is played, or when a poorly constructed bridge seizes and sways to the right frequency of breeze, so do each of us resonate to a few symbols, a few objects, ultimately, to a few hidden names. When a country can resonate as one, it will conquer, when a church can resonate as one, it means revival, when a scientist rife with a great idea sings it, the world is electrified.

                To put the same idea in the mythic register, before this lifetime we were born in the womb of the mother as sparks, breaking apart from single cluster. I am from this cluster, my neighbor from that. When I can hear the resonance of my innermost, I can also hear it in others. There are those throughout history and throughout the world now who are mine and after my own. Those are my readers and my favorites: for them I exist and write. Though my words dampen and depress this one and that one, my own accept it as their own, since it feeds their soul, and for them there is no envy, for who envies what is properly his own? I never envied Emerson, or Whitman, or Nietzsche, not even in the way I would envy my brother or friend; for I felt a right to all their ideas, and would not blush to have plagiarized them. For in the world of spiritual power, there is no copyright. One mind works through us, and we are diamond bursts from the same ore.

                Nevertheless, I find in most my friends, only a strand of me, and in me only a strand of them. I take from Paul what Paul can give me, and give him the same in turn, and we do not grow divine through our barter, but we are still warmed, as I am warmed by the love of my cat. Yet I long always to find my own, and draw near as I dare, lest the overfull lust of resonance forces us to close the eyelid of our heart, and blind us from too much light. We did not come into the world atop each other, but diffused and scattered.

                Let us decorate our lives with only those symbols that resonate. When you deck your apartment, consider it a sort of wind tunnel, in which the alignment of all things comes to resonate and charge you. The mere set of your shoes, let alone the set of your voice, sets my world in order, till all I own and influence lights up with me, and if my full influence could be mapped, it would like a satellite view of a city at night, where the collective streetlights outline the cities.

 

I’m slow to love, and slower to cease …

The wraith of our romance will linger

I wish for you close, and cornered you flee

Your echoing words are my singers.

 

I face the world and say:

In this life I do the reaching

And you do the pulling away

What can I hold to?

 

                The circumstance of our birth, lineage, location, nature of conception, heritage of parents, all resonate deep in my soul, and even distant adoption cannot shake it out. Like a halo around the innermost, our conception sings out, like a rip in space, the same rip we must slip through upon death. The best stories are like daily life: the first chapters set it up, the last few unwind it. And we are choosing and freely creating ourselves from the first. Necessity finds final form in freedom.

                Let us therefore drink from our roots. Insist on your family, your city, your nation. Take in the national literature as your mother’s milk. Know your fated place in history and the entire wisdom of mankind is your nourishment.

                Great books and great ideas take centuries to digest. To give accurate summaries, nicknames, and glosses takes painstaking insight into essentials, and many generations of redaction and refinement so that, finally, we all have a sense of what the great books and great art is about, and those who study it carefully especially know what a rich literature of commentary as grown over the surface of a book like a garden.

                Blood is the red thread. We each have a style for building friendships. I have a stereotyped way of solving problems, as do you. When I can reduce the terms of each situation into the language I am used to, then I can twist the problem into the shape I can best deal with. This is why some friendships take longer than others to initiate. Some strange treasures take months of careful patience to seduce into friendship. I can hardly stand you now, by and by I will mourn your absence.

                Blood is soul, and all that is soul is analogous to blood; just as spirit is breath, and all that is spirit is analogous to breath. Meditating is counting your breath. A better meditating is counting the breath of great books, the period the author uses, the punctuations marks. This alone let’s you know the breath and heft of his mind’s lungs. Read his soul too, the nouns and verbs of his speech, which is blood of blood.

                I read reflexively, life is a sort of reading and writing to me, and literally, I feel naked without my blank book and pencil in my pocket, and a book for reading in my hand. I carry them as the wanderer carries his walking stick and wallet. I read widely, every feasting my mind. And there are a few books that are blood brothers to me, and I have dipped my blood into them, and theirs into mine:

 

Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, and Gay Science

Emerson’s Essays, and Conduct of Life

Whitman’s Leaves of Grass

Thoreau’s Walden

Melville’s Moby Dick

 

                I call them blood of my blood, for their nouns and verbs are nutrients of my soul, just as Whitman and Emerson are the gods that live in my lungs.

                Solitude does not mean isolation: one can be alone in the city, and crowded alone in his room. It is good to fast from your work – in my case to put down good books. Every rule must make an exception, every taboo must make an indulgence.

                In daily life, my cell phone is a sort of tether for balance – I send out dozens of text messages which are empty, yet breathing is also empty, yet necessary. Genius must balance itself with a lot of stupidity, and brilliance must dance with his shadow.

                Ayn Rand and Slovej Zizek and William Gass I have read all they wrote: and yet I despise each of them as ugly people. They knew certain magical tricks I would wrest from them, yet their souls did not resonate to mine, and I sat at their feet only to step on their necks. It is for my own that I sing, those who were soul of my soul at our conception, dear to the universe in her grace, in that time’s place that coincides with each of our earthly conceptions. I take from the world and give to you.

                Soul resonates to soul, and when all the parts find a common denominator and resonates that louder, and become a unit, the central atom of that being emerges from wherever he always was, and is born from eternity into time. Whether this account is metaphysical nonsense or true science is no matter to us, for it is a poetry to set us in our place – and for this reason metaphysics is necessary and therefore true.

                We are one blood, wherever and whenever we are born on this planet, and to whomever we are born. And each individual soul finds its analogies in nature, and finds a common substance with some peculiar form. William Bentley resonated to the snowflake, and studied them with a passionate fit to melt them all. Darwin was a catalog of beetle’s physiognomies. Caesar was a nation who led a nation. Every man is layered and thick: perhaps his essence is a name hidden in some distant star, and here he walks on earth, and his analogy walks again on every inhabited planet, and perhaps under different guises and species.

                Even still, the traumas and intimacies of our youth set an energy deep in the soul, in a central layer, and all intimacy changes the hum of our self. In a classroom, one seat will call to me, and in any arrangement of events, in any society, I will roll to my place like a marble down a hill, till the gravitational center fit for me and no other I will find.

                I handle all problems as if they were the same problem. My private language and yours does not need to figure out solutions every day, so much as reduce each situation to a primitive language, a simple set of terms, of our own idiolect, perhaps unspeakable and mute, and after we have done that, we can solve the problem readily – just as any problem in a formal logic class is easy once you can reduce the terms to standard notation.

                And this is why we study theory, and why theory energizes and empowers us. Theory is the wide heaven whose whole eternity presses down into the one finger of practice and allows its success. And so we can do all the petty duties of life, because our full soul is wide as the universe, and puts the full pressure on the subtle moment. The weight of the universe finds final twitch in my typing tips.

                And so we conspire with our intimates. We breath the same breath, and soon start to talk alike. How soon husband has his wife in his heart and lungs, feels her judgment and praise in all he does, even if the external she is ignorant, can’t even leave the trash a mess without her nag at the back of his ear. And finally her voice becomes his own voice, and the spiritual singularity begins. In the next life, their blood will be knit to blood, an achievement reserved for their children in this life.

                All great thinkers are in conspiracy with others. The Allist overlords of the world are none other than the great minds who have always had designs for the human race, and aimed to set the tower of literature up to the eternal heavens. The men and women from my spark know me already, knew me in centuries ago, and will know me forever more. Let this book die, it will make no difference. I have already whispered it to the universe, and she gossips in each their ears.

                Read. And as you read, think. Step back and watch yourself read and think: you are knitting a dual thread. Let the words hypnotize you. Every book breaths. You are hypnotized by tones of voice, cadence and rhythm. Let a book do this, and yet keep your critical eye in the background, invisible and never impressed and never unimpressed. Pick up ten books one after the other, reading only a paragraph, and you escape all spells. Read any book for ten pages, and the magic is upon you. Read the first book you hold, the same paragraph ten times, and you are breathing deeply the air. The scholar will energize you. But remember that you are the magician’s apprentice: what you learn in this life you can take to eternity. Keep your eyes open. By hypnotized and watch how it is done.

                Breath is musical. Tension increases satisfaction. Eat ten dry cookies, and the milk when you finally allow it to your lips is orgasmic. Sex is so much fuller with an hour of foreplay, or better still, months of romantic trifles and teases. The dissonance of music is superb, especially to increase the relief and triumph of a full flung cadence. The guitarist Steve Vai loves complex and disorienting virtuosity, but only impresses me when he can draw a simplistic anthem of a riff for conclusion. And so the high-minded confusion of sophisticated complexity must reduce to the mantra, simple, basic, and bright.

                Anxieties freeze energy from exploding, save the system from crisis, and depress the system. Yet they pool frustration into muscles, tics, distortions of body and mind, waiting till finally the angel of grace can snip the wire and let the full load of aching pent pain explode into pure love joy. The same method, which is shaped like a joke with a punch line, is the wisdom and foolishness of gnawing the teeth ragged on a koan for forty years, until one opens ones eyes, which weren’t’ even closed in the first place, and is enlightened. Nirvana is a punch line long panted for: cease all desire, and desire to cease all desire.

                Language is magic. It is the handle to hold every experience. Language is a blanket over us, a matrix of syntax, as if computer code flowed in lime green letters around us, each man his own code, his own idiolect, pulsing logic and grammar from the polestars behind his eyes. Every sentence is a bent glass tube, and the mind a thick purple smoke that passes through them. Thus the language of books shapes the mind, pulls it out like glass, grows opaque with our emotions. It is rightly said that we can only give from what we have, and work from what we are. Yet the world plants little seeds in our brain, until self and world are intermingled, and I am world soul, and the great single mind of Adam that is the whole of mankind, gods and demigods included, is in my mind as well, and I look on my neighbor as a fellow cell in the great Leviathan of the human body. “Perusha” we are called, and the infinitely thick layers of each of our cells are scatted throughout the cosmos. I have always been, yet common sense says I am only thirty, and the moment of my conception is in the memories of my parents. I am most energized when I am in touch with all that is of me, heart of my heart, breath of my breath. Soul and spirit must meet and mingle, like Allfather Odin when he fell in love with Loki, and shared blood with the beautiful giant, as brother; so is our own doom and world’s end based in the blood we’ve mingled with our own – never love a woman unfit to mother your children! Never commit a deed unfit to flower your biography! Find your place within the Motherverse, and you will be energized to do all you can.

 

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

 

to wed solitude

I’m slow to love, and slower to cease …

The wraith of our romance will linger

I wish for you close, and cornered you flee

Your echoing words are my singers.

 

Well! Philosophers wed themselves to solitude: lacking that they have no peace. It is time to take seriously the prospect of giving my life to Allism, the philosophy I have already spent a decade writing, and ceasing to struggle in snow fingers of love. It takes a strong man to embrace solitude, but no wise man embraces isolation. It is better not to seek friends where there can be no friendship: how your love will be thrown in your face. Better to slowly warm up to a friendship, and quickly let go when it fades. Better to knit your soles to your shadow, and nod silent approval at the cheerful reflection.

 

Take care, Caretakers!

 

Daniel

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

 

"divorce" an essay

This essay on divorce was difficult, not emotionally, as you would expect, but intellectually, as I feel I do not understand the topic, and the ideas are ill-formed and will require a decade to fully formulate. All problems are intellectual problems, yet until the emotions are put into their proper circuits, we cannot begin to see what the problem actually is. This is how I feel, and so the essay is a true essay, an attempt, and a failure at that.

Daniel Christopher June

 

Divorce

 

Parting Song

 

Love at last has sunk my ship

My lips impress on letters dead

I stamp them home to fill my stead

We would not budge on principle

Our love crossed pride invincible

I think I let my weakness slip.

 

I’m lonely for you

I haven’t a friend

I won’t be consoled

There isn’t an end

I’m eager for you

I’d sacrifice all

Except for dread pride

Invinciply tall

Protector of love

Avenger of gifts

Tender as life

There’s teeth in his lips.

 

Goodbye goodbye

Hypocrite’s parting

Each time I end you

My heart is restarting.

 

 

            Since love implies intimacy, and since intimacy requires control to allow joy rather than destruction, and since control implies possession, since nobody can control what he does not possess – indeed since having control of something is the only true way to possess it – then the deepest of loves implies ownership, and we can rightly say that a “disinterested love” is a contradiction in terms. Love is a weakness, a need we cannot by our own power fulfill, yet the loving relationship implies the sort of mutual submission that unifies two into an interface, a single organism like two trees knit together that must balance and pull from the shared base between them. Love, romance, marriage, and family, are about ownership, ownership and roles. Being a husband or wife means playing a part, means accepting the conventions one has learned his whole life, and creatively working within them to allow his individuality to grow through them. Every man is more than a man when he joins a group: as a manager at the store, he aligns his angers, joys, fears, and hopes to the company’s angers, joys, fears, and hopes, and the outer layers of his heart take on the shape of the business, so that he is finally representative, and becomes more than a man, but also a group-leader. Marriage too is an institution of roles; the men and women who join it develop further layers of being to express the same inner self.

            A relationship requires honesty, and yet love itself is a sort of deception. Falling in love is the first deception, and deceptions characterize love at every turn. Mature love is often a “love at first sight.” Yet how can this be, since strange things are never loved before they become familiar? The new beloved only seems beautiful because the man has been meeting pieces of her his whole life. He takes decades getting to know his mother and father, and what he hates in them he will nevertheless seek in a mate, despite himself, so that he can say with justification to his wife “You are just like your mother,” and imply even more that she reminds him of his own mother. More to the point, the man has spent his whole life getting to know himself, both the real self he is, and the ideal self he wishes to be. Glances of these find face in his new mate. In sum, the new person is taken as if she were a freshly sprung goddess, but the truth is the man has known her his whole life in the analogies and mirros of each of her fragments. If she gives him enough material to work with, he will fashion divine the remainder. And to aid this process, the fresh lovers try to resemble each other. They raise their antennae and hone in on what the other wants to hear. If the woman loves music, but the man has no such interest, he will at least say that he likes this or that song. Whatever they have in common receives special emphasis; what they do not have in common will be ignored. This mutual deception characterizes the dazzling romance: love grows with this deceptions protection, but must finally burst through it, so that the individuals can achieve true intimacy. Disillusionment is the beginning of the actual romance. Perhaps ten years of love before a couple finally falls in love.

            If the personality could be viewed as a spiral drawing, in which the initial shape of the self becomes more exaggerated and contorted at the higher layers, then it could be said that utter intimacy is a miracle meant for few people, and at rare times. The outer layers suffice us. We play along with our roles, making clever variations – I’m this kind of policeman, but still a policeman; I’m that kind of sister, but still a sister. While the proudest people will flaunt their vices and hide their virtues, it is best always to temper pride with humility, which is the love of serving, and let both our vices and virtues educate others. Learn from my strengths as well as my weaknesses. Yes, it is wisdom to keep the inner layers forever hidden from most people, but if I do not shine my inner sun for at least the trusted friend or the intimate lover, then I will be truly abstinent, the worst of conditions, and never feel love’s touch upon my soul.

            The trouble with intimacy is that wisdom allows it only upon proof of commitment. And the trouble with commitment is that it requires trusting somebody who might hurt you. It is the inner self that allows the possiblity of divorce. My internalization of her, my inner wife, the she that I have made into a full inner environment, which I plug into her external reality as often as I can, must come into contact with two things: my innermost self, on proper occasions, and her innermost self, on proper occasions. If we do not grow together, then we grow apart. Despite all the emotional drama, fights, clutter of talk, and the plain noise of both marital disputes and also marital bliss, underneath that, every marriage problem is philosophical. The rest is so much indirection. The real disjunctions in life are between ideas. The outer stuff, the betrayals, lies, accusations, and mistrust, are external layers beyond the basic self. The more cowardly the man and woman, the less obvious the real problem is. Masks and excuses cover the idea. The boldest of men and women quickly pierce the core problem, and so are more likely to resolve it, with grace, poise, and kindness.

            It can be said that intelligence is in itself neither good nor bad. History’s cruellest people were intelligent, and knew how to psychically destroy others. And yet, an intelligent man bent on improving his beloved can do as much good as the evil man can do bad – no, but even more good, for the badness finally tells on itself and is escaped, whereas goodness is often fortified and further requested.

            But even more important than the implicit philosophical dispute behind every divorce is the psychological impossibility of union when each person comes to stand for those incompatible ideas. The initial roles the man and woman were able and willing to fill could not remain constant: the inner ideas of our being changed, both in regard to our partner, and also in regard to our emerging self. Each self slowly unfolds from pure power, and converts into form as it touches the world. Nevertheless, some powers remain in zygote for years, and only slowly grow out into final worldy layers. Because of what I do in the world, the choices I make, the virtues I cultivate, and the vices I permit, my power grows and diminishes, till I am a different shape, and can no longer fit into the niche I first occupied. If I mindfully match my shape to hers, we will grow together. Then marriage is a dance, and when she retreats I advance. But when one partner deeply redefines his self-image, it shines in all his actions, and he is a better person. In such a case, his spouse may make herself worse, and this from an unconscious sense of unworthiness, and in such a case, she will sabatoge the love in order to flee.

            An idea, when drawn out into implications, and charged with desires, becomes a habit. The growth of the soul is in producing ideas and turning them into habits: this creativity is the purpose of both this life and the next. Ultimately, a marriage must stand for an idea, and the idea of the marriage must hold integrity against life’s trifles and tragedies. Shared goals unite a marriage, as shared goals and shared enemies unite all groups. A couple must also revere marriage as sacred – something essentially foreign to the Christian and Buddhist mindset in the scriptures, but pragmatically at a forefront in their day-to-day lives. Marriage is more sacred than religion and God, possibly more longlasting than either, and with more powerful consequences than both combined. The being created from a marriage, the group soul, which buds and complicates with children, is the primordial group-mind, the unit which produces more human beings, and reproduces the original members of the family as better or worse individuals both in and out of their roles. The worth of a pure Mary, a pure Jason, a pure Daniel, is his worth to himself; the marriage need not concern itself with this, it is not the goal of the marriage, but the goal of the individual who uses the marriage (and everything else) to advance it. Thus marriage is not selfish to the individual, it is selfish to the marriage, seeks to strengthen the marriage and do what is right for the marriage, even at the cost of the individual and the larger society. This is the nature of each layer of being: it wishes to first serve and allow itself, and then to use that self to fit in and beautify the rest. Marriage fights for marriage, nation fights for nation, religion fights for religion: each being must protect and advance itself, first of all, and those beloved of that self, secondly.

            The emergence of a new idea, the philosophical moment of self re-definition, does not seem nor feel like an intellectual moment at all, no, but feels hot and tempered like a virus feels like a fever. The fights, follies, and mutual attacks and betrayals are much fanfare by which the characters of each may well be levelled and forever wounded – it requires much tact to protect your heart from the very person whom you have already given it to! – but such is the necessity and fatal insistance of the personal growth, which wasn’t our own choice to begin with, the emergence of an idea into a full blown habit-sequence: an attitude, a belief, a personality, a character. And like the invisible virus, we wouldn’t even know that such an idea existed were it not for certain microscopic self-evaluations during the strife of couples.

            Whatever can be said for or against a spouse, it is all secondary. The intrusion of a new idea, an aspect of the self the person would not sacrifice, is the real cause of disagreement. The betrayals, lies, and rank vices that accompany it serve to protect it – though they seldom leave once they are evoked. The soul must grow. And though almost all divorces could be avoided in patient and wise spouses who knew how to grow together, how few of us are wise!

            The marriage, the household, the relationship as a whole represents a thick tissue of habits, mutual expectations, consistencies, and regularities that freeze the individual mind, and give it the opium of comfort and security. Habit keeps even the painful unions solid. And this is good. Nobody would resist such a love unless the partner were daily preparing to perjure herself more and more, till audibly she has confessed herself into two people: the apparent and the secret. At this point, the disjunction is real and final – though it may be years until it is apparent.

            While marriages will continue to be common and expected, and divorces nearly as common and expected, to do either well, to stay married well, or to divorce well, would require exceptional human beings. Being exceptional, they would need no advice on the matter, and therefore, there is no need to speak of it. For the rest of us, who at times do not know how to overcome our insecurities and weaknesses, marriage is a platform for exhibiting and intensifying those same insecurities and weaknesses, for pledging our protection over our spouse’s weaknesses, kissing the gimpy heart, accepting the person in their poverty and often enough using it to at times torture them. Cruelty is a mode of power, and marriage is as much a contract of power as it is of love. The partnership is not only about love, for love balances herself against power, and the fears that make it necessary. As even the business relationship, which empahsizes power, is also about love; so the marriage which emphasizes love is about dominion, rights, control, advantage, and leverage. In fact, such a dual twist isn’t lacking even in the innocent prattle of five-year-olds. Power and love are the fabric of social interaction, and so we must not let pretty ideals deceive us: marriage wouldn’t be half as interesting if it were merely a union of love. Since love is about intimacy, tenderness, openness, and touch, we must know what to expect from another, what to predict: and to be able to predict a person is to in part own them, for ownership is in control, and what can be predicted can be planned around, anticipated, and controlled.

            The highest control of others requires forming a theory about their tendencies, about having an implicit philosophy of their being. Philosophy is the art of defining. It is concerned with the forms of ideas, the forms of processes and systems, of structure in its most abstract. This is why philosophy is not only the trunk from which every branch of science grows – and science would be possible without it – but also the world tree which springs to the heavens of human experience, the inner world of the assumptions. And heaven is a prepatory world which the hellish desires must intermingle to make the habits of desires that motivate all human action. Marriage comes into contact not in the heavenly realms of pure philosophy, just as warfare between countries does not come into contact between political theorists – and yet it is the innocuous philosophical ideas that leaden each bullet. Ideas move the world, ideas set the tone, and desire, the heart, the mind, come afterwords to justify and allow them. Almost all the philosophy of the world is performed unconsciously in the heaven of the mind. Only perverts philosophize externally.

**

            When any two forces reach a deadlock, they require the determining third to deliver them. The impasse implicit in any duality, the seeming incompatiblity between them, requires the mediating third to triangulate a balance between them. In a marriage, the marriage counselor, the mutual friends, and the children can each of these serve this function, an element that is partly made up of both of them, partly different than either. And this is what we expect of a third: it is in part an aspect of both of us, in part different than both of us. Yes the heaven of concepts breaks down into neat dualities, yet we can complicate those dualities, not to deconstruct bianaries, but to reinforce them.

            The larger system can help us. We can plug into work, church, circles of friends, or world-literature to anchor and sway us. The larger world exists for our benefit, and our greatest glory is to become great enough to add to the larger world. The pride of all great men is intensified by their humility to serve what they adore. Humility and pride intensify each other: their opposites of recalcitrance and guilt should be shaken off and avoided.

            Yet though many can advise you on a difficult matter, only one can advise your will: the soul uncertain, wrestling with itself for its own truth. Only this delicious uncertainty and profound self-doubt can earn a man true trust in the greatest being he can ever know: his own will. Therefore, we out to doubt ourselves and not seek the advice of others. Though that wonderful muse speaks music to us, and we cry out “I need the nectar of your words!” we must give her silence and let her be silent in turn.

Silence is the wisest word.

To hold your strength,

You must hold your peace.

Settle disputes with a grace of hush.

            What is all this talk, talk, talk, talk? We simply must talk to think as a couple. The brain of the family is the language between the members. A family more than anything else is a group of stories about characters who can’t leave each other. You are stuck in a family. The entire savoir of the family unit is to make divorce as difficult and ignoble as possible – and that is the true kindness and mercy to society, and the sacrifice of the individual. The family knows itself as the family, and its stories build around us the immovable units.

            We tell stories to structure experience into a preferred form. Memories are no good. They are too exact, too literal. We need to falsify our memories to make them useful. This falsification is not by malicious intent, but by poetic license, the poetic license built into the neuronal system. We tell ourselves stories continually to process the form of our history, and so raw experience tilts in the rock tumbler till our life is a set of gems we can spread before anybody who cares to know us.

            William James had a knack for textbook simplifications. He learned this from writing his textbook on psychology, a painful experience for him, but essential for granting him the power to reduce complex problems to a short list of essentials. In this way, the philosopher is the instructer of man and marriage, because he can reduce the complex to a few simple ideas. He tells stories about our stories, and fishes from them the essential features by which to build an ideal man, an archetypcal self, a basic myth-memory to organize us. What is our family about? What is it we are here for? Are we like so many couples who discuss the family and our family endlessly for the mere sake of family? Or are family values again to promote a higher value – does our family serve a philosophy? Few families will. And of those who do, most will serve prefabricated religions. Better to define the family according to a personal philosophy and an individual value. Each family develops its own rituals – and as rituals are the enactment of fantasy, the family shares its own fantasized purpose. We each become expressions of the family idea. Why would such a unit ever disintegrate?

            Sometimes a small particle of impossibility grows out of the souls of partners, and they build between them a contradiction. Their love becomes impossible. As the essense of their love disintegrates, they will praise love more, praise each other more, for praise is the mask of opposition. If their love were true, they would not need to praise love.  Sometimes it takes great courage to leave somebody you love. Ignore praise and blame – they deceive. Do the courageous thing and estrange your lover, if this is the kindest love. Just as a great book or work of art only becomes so when it is assumed out of its context, survives its century, and speaks to the catholicity of mankind, so too does a romance become immortal when it survives its immediate cause, escapes the mortality of having a history, a reason for being, and becomes always and ever. Extract your romance from its environment, and like the great book, it becomes part of the Bible, the Great Books of the World. The scholar is friends to the best men in history. The lover is kin to the great lovers in history: their poems are his poems, and their experience are his. Metaphors are the savoirs of man, and the greatest gifts of all the world religions combined are only a few sturdy tropes. In the same way, the idea of a relationship, the shape of its tropes, are few and simple, but translatable to any circumstance. The more particular and ideosyncratic the couple, the more qualifiers on their love, the less flexible it will be, till it grows cramped in its own armor, and sinks.

            It is unjust to love a man who doesn’t love himself, or respect a man who doesn’t respect himself. You must take his own self-evaluation as valid, and not overstep it. Let a man judge himself, for he is most intimate with himself. You can only insult a man who is insultable, and offend a man who is offensible. When your heart is hurt, hide it up and let it heal. Now is the time to work on your power; let love hide away. Anything else would be a humiliation. Do not seek friends when you are lonely, but when you are friendly.

            Win your own admiration, and then you are admirable. Love as you think best, and you will be worthy of the same love. Speak to truth, but the full truth. Adolescents mistake rudeness for honesty, but truth is not full when it merely rips away the fineries of politeness. The full truth is gentle and beautiful, and possible only for the most powerful man who could psychologically destroy his friends and enemies. True tenderness is only possible for thick arms. It has been said that the one who loves less in a relationship controls more: care more and you can do less. And so love appears the opposite of freedom. But if true love is willing to lose what it loves – that is, if true love is willing to be equal to true hate – then that love is more than love, but, mingled with power, has become passion. And passion itself, the child of love and power, must again mingle with her opposite, the absense of love and power, cold dismissal. Only when passion is willing to cease all passion is it in contol of itself, and then passion self-overcomes, and thus allowed itself to take or leave what she loves the most. Only when you do not need something can you fully own it. Jung said that patients don’t get cured, they simply move on. Sometimes the greatest and deepest loves must be willing to move on, and let go. Perhaps the deepest passion in the world sets aside the beloved unworthy: she would be happier in the arms of a lover her equal, less passionate, less intense, less intimate, less tender. For love must match love, mind must match mind, true lovers are twin born from the dawn of time, and come to the earth maybe to find each other in this body, maybe not. Such utter intimacy, to find your other and take her into the centermost of your soul, is the work of many lives. Let us not trouble ourselves if our marriage fails this goal.

            The mind is either wide or narrow, the actions are either impulsive or inhibited. The mind narrow thinks of less but knows it better; the actions inhibited at least give the mind its power. If the action is impulsive, the action is strong, but the man isn’t. This is how passion must join with its opposite, so that in all things, the muscles of the passions are balanced and peacefully working against each other. If one passion dominated a man, twelve lesser ones must grow up to put it in check. Monopolies are odious, and a love without the skin of hate would be death. Intelligence has a greater capacity for boredom; passion has a greater capacity for impatience. The democracy of the soul is a set of passions where all men are created equal, and some are more equal than others. Aristocracy is the rule of all progress: some passions must rule the others. And in the same way, the family dynamic is one in which one spouse has certain powers over the other, and the other spouse has also her certain powers over him.

            How quickly we resurrect the structures we learned from our parents’ marriage, and the structures of our childhood friendships, imposed on the beloved flunky. Certain basic structures become reflexive templates, to fill in the ambiguity. Just as any group of men slowly fade into the template of the lecture hall when they assemble within a building, and just as their children must be threatened and cajoled to sit and be quiet while the speaker has the floor, so too do the archetypes of marriage impress on the minds of youth at every turn within our society, so that staunch individualists that they are, they exude the template of marriage upon  their spouses. What I expect from you needs not be said: we both know what we are supposed to expect from each other. The entire world is umpire to our faults and follies.

            Each process and each organization is like a complex machine, or a great single celled life form, in which modules are added and grow spontaneously to balance it during its travels, system against system. I am my individual self, but I am my group self, and the roles I play in the marriage must balance against the roles I place elsewhere. Browbeat me here and I will balance with a bit of browbeating of my own at work.

            Or again like a great spinning top, the figure of marrriage sits upon the fewest points and must balance itself with habits that will let that one union hold in place.

            Each marriage requires a metaphysics: why marry? What does it do for reality? Imagining a larger structure within which to fit our experience is the needed metaphysics to make sense of any world. The metaphorical whole gives a spin on all these concrete realities. The dishes in my sink are help in place by dreams and dragons. Metaphysics is art – false yet necesssary. The greater purpose of our lives cannot be proved or disproves: but we must posit it in order to live.

            We must hope for our marriage, that it will all work out. Optimism requires a silent knowledge of life’s miseries. Nobody could be optimistic unless he had a propensity to depression.

           

**

            When one is told he is being divorced, served the papers, and rejected despite his love, it might affect his mood. For me it feels like boulders beneath my ribs: emotions too strong to express. My only recourse is too sleep and let them dissolve into my blood.

            With such a wound, how does one react? I am deeply gestating: my creativity is curled like a kitten in the tender of my heart, while the walls thicken and calcify.

            With any grief or trouble, there comes the moment of insight when a man sees through to the reason, deeper than mere circumstances. At this point there need be no pleads or accusations agianst providence of fate, because something subtler and finer has revealed itself – necessity. Then his heartstorms are finished and he finds himself grateful even for his sufferings, grateful to himself and the universe as a whole (the two beings essential to philosophy). The moment of clarity lasts as long as it needs to. After that, he can return to living life.

            Whatever we may wish to present to the world, whatever we may fancy a truth of our soul, nevertheless the inner truth shines through. Fate emerges from the innermost.

            A failed marriage seeks to hang itself upon a mutual gratitude. When I can kiss you goodbye with thanks, I will have finally left you.

            Christianity praises the widow for giving away her last cent. I would prefer each man and woman to give from his or her abudnance, to respect this woman for what she had in abundance – not the useless cent, but her cooking, or sewing, or advice, or whatever creative, natural and beautiful thing she had to give. I don’t want a god to give me his corpse on a cross,  but to give me his attention and loving patience as I write a poem or sing a song. Let him take from me, if he is so generous. In the same way, the marriage is truly failed, indeed never should have been, when the abundance of a husband’s or wife’s soul is not to the taste of the spouse. If I am to write, and you can’t stand to read, what are we doing here? If I sing songs, but you are deaf, let us part ways. Genius is strange and rich. If you don’t have a strange taste for my strange fruit, then let us not harass each other. Unity is conversation in presense. Let me speak my soul’s language. If we are soul knit to soul, it will be your language too. Perhaps it may take ten years for you to internalize the structure of my soul. Perhaps a true love takes ten years to master. Perhaps you must be patient with me for a very long time, and learn to love me. But I must give what I love to give, and not what I hate to give. Don’t ask me money, don’t ask bravado. Ask for what my soul loves to give. I am a writer, and so I will write stories for our children. I am a singer, and so I will sing you songs. Let us eat the fruit of each other’s lips. This alone is love of growth, soul to soul, so you eat my soul and I eat yours. Then there can still be a marriage. But as it is, you cringe at my passion. Do not think I will hate you for it. You must be my friend.

            A person can only give from what he has. If my mother was cold, and never gave me affection, still I can be gratetful for what she did give me, because she gave me from what she had, not from what she lacked. I can be grateful to world scriptures for what they gave me, and yet not call them sufficient literature, being all to aware at what they lacked. Being naturally grateful, I will praise them for how they made me better, and seek elsewhere what they lacked. Those writers, those people, those friends, who stayed with me through all my moods, through all my problems, those are dear to me; they transcend their immediate contexts: I internalize them; they become the populace of my heart. And so I am grateful for you, though I never could figure out why you loved me, and now cannot figure out why you stopped.

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

 

"hope" a poem

Hope

 

I search the clouds for a wrinkle of rainbow

Some sliver from which to wring a droplet of hope

Give me torrents give me sky fall

But I will pull your tongue

Till you spit that color thread.

 

Perhaps the sleek seal shivers the rain from off her fur

My parchment skin stains and scars with each dewdrop

I’ll weep blood for you

My eyes will sink pupil ink in words to peer

Forever out to my distant lovers – my beloved readers

These words my very view of love for you

For here in this place there is no color sign

Upon which to gaze

My eyes and blood are incarnated as book

My love is for you

This is my one hope.

 

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

 

Making a Living, having a purpose

I found this essay difficult to write. Even now its structure needs layers and layers of integration; I’ll do that over the next few months. But what troubled me was the topic, that of the necessities of career and family, and their relation to working towards a life purpose. It is a personal question I am not certain I have fully answered.

Daniel

 

 

 

Making a Living, Having a Purpose

 

            Though there are two great needs in man, for love and for importance, and though these are allowed and structured by our institutions of marriage and the work-place, it is yet unclear whether a man can be fulfilled through them. Love is not enough, work is not enough: family and money impose duties on the man, they collude together, so he most clasp the handle of employment no matter how hot it burns. Marriage and career are the foundations that set up a man, give him a place, make him a member of society, and yet both can tear the threads of his heart inside out, and neither redeems him, except when he adds the top to the pyramid, combining love and work together into passion. Each man needs a life-purpose.

If my heart weren’t bruised, my mind could think

If my tears weren’t thick, my eyes could see.    

            So says every philosopher who falls in love. He must make his heart proud again, and not let the sorrows of love and the indignities of work distract him. He must enshrine his purpose.

            This purpose cannot be in mere family, for love cannot make a God of man, nor in work alone, if it is not his work, his rules, his own goals. Since these institutions are external, they are also alien: he may succeed at them, but he did not create them, they are not his image, are not his emanation. He has no final possession of them: his wife may leave him, his boss may fire him. There, he plays a role, and yet his ever simmering genius feels a greater calling within him, the fire and intensity of pure god in his heart, and he calls this “art, poetry, purpose, religion,” so many words for the same thing, his very self, which must expand forever wider to fill the entire universe.

            Those who insist on their own way, and do not readily fit in the ready-made genres will never be rich. Their success, if they find it, falls as a happy accident. For the rest of us, we must work jobs that do starve the soul. It is better if we can simply avoid losing creative energy on them, can make the most of them, can enjoy some humility to balance our grandiosity. I sing a little verse to myself while I serve customers:

Feathered Feet

Cryptic Smirk

Chest of Pride

Eyes of Sparks

 

Tender words

Address your god

Honeyed tropes

Grant you massage.

 

            Apollo worked as a shepherd, Hercules toiled his labors. And yet we resonate with Boguereau, who said “Each day I go to my studio full of joy; in the evening when obliged to stop because of the darkness I can scarcely wait for the next morning to come. My work is not only a pleasure, it has become a necessity. No matter how many other things I love in my life, if I cannot give myself to my dear painting, I am miserable.” He could only be happy when painting. This is the suffering found in every great passion.

            A man must not seek virtue when he chooses his job, must not do what is right, but do what opens his genius. Virtue can corrupt; it is better to be original than moral. If a man is a great artist, but is convinced by his family to waste time with charity work or missionary trips, he would decay, gain a false, external virtue, a virtue foreign to his native abilities and genius. Many actions are called moral. Being active in politics is called a democratic duty. However, some people would better spend no time at politics. What is right for each individual is the opposite of the Kantian ethic: instead of asking if everybody should do a thing, we should strive to do what nobody else can our should do. That, for us, is our place on this earth, our calling, our virtue. If we are to imitate a great man, we are to imitate his greatness, but not his method for achieving it.

            With troubled economies, and no money for artistic and literary passion, it is best to choose a supplementary job that doesn’t get in the way of the real thing. And yet, we internalize structures from our job, and they play out in all we do. The fundamental structures of our heart, the moods and attitudes from which we build all habits, conform to what we do the most. This systematizes the rest. Only what you do always can you do naturally. Whitman gained from working as a newspaper editor for so many years, editing his poems as a newspaper editor would, clipping and pasting wholesale, with an editorial style akin to the modern word-processing style. Our character is the sum of what we do: our career sets our character.

            An artist must love and master his medium, and explore its limits. This is only possible for a metaphorical mind, that thinks of his art through his daily chores. When your dishes, when your broom, when your job, stand for ideas, you will be able to practice continually. It is best to study always the same few things. The overly praised curiosity of the child lacks discipline. As adults, we grow a few permanent interests and become incurious regarding the rest: and this is wisdom. We must be akin to Odin, with one eye ever in wisdom’s well, one eye on the grand picture of our purpose. A few versatile instruments are better than many specific; the best fighter resorts to the same basic moves. My mind is a thousand Hindu hands moving countless ideas, pushing around all the details of life, while the central blue hands do the true work, the simple thing.

            Meanwhile, we ought to work continually on our project, as with Emerson with his Notebooks, Whitman with his Leaves of Grass, Ive’s with his music projects, and Edison with his notebooks: decades of accumulation of notes and ideas, thick with ideas like Cambrian fossils. Flaubert labored for days over a single page, and this must also be our second pole: intense attention to detail. It is like a great triangle, where billions of ideas press their weight down, pressuring the pure gold out the nib of our pen. Writers are oysters who need only minor irritants to produce pearls: normal trauma would shut them up. The body language of inner rhythm of sentences can express worlds, because the writer is grown so sensitive and nuanced. And as a true virtuoso, he knows how to balance complex chaos with sloganistic simplicity, like the guitarist Steven Vai, who alternates between simplistic guitar riffs and chaotic excess.

            We must work our jobs as if we didn’t really belong to them, work while meditating on our real interest. Newton focused on math so intently that he forgot dinner; Joseph Sealinger was so caught up in Homer that he failed to register the massacre of Bartholomew as it unfolded around him.

            And yet me must engage the world and our chores, with slow accumulations in a hundred pockets, let them all gestate and produce in turn. We must actually care about friends, work, chores, and duties, a little bit at a time, to learn from them. My heart swells by accumulation of such stays of energy, which ripen and finally explode. When the passion is there, the world must bend, when the passion is lacking, I must bend. Every fight, ever dispute, every joy, ever intrigue, every story, feeds some fruit, which when ready ripens into the perpetual harvest of my heart. Such was the way of Ives, Emerson, Whitman, Edison, Leonardo, and all the others who put the wealth of a lifetime in the pen nib of the moment’s art.

            Emerson wrote:

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

            There is in each man a central name, his first word of creation, the name he said when he came into existence. The logic of that name structures the rest. The bleed of our ideas must follow the same circuit. As William James says “Knit each new thing on some acquisition already there. See each new thing as an answer to a question already present in the mind.”

            But to think we must learn to shut up. Strength is silent. If a man talks long, he speaks his spirit gone. His very being leaps out his throat. Better to sit long and brood over his soul. It is best to “Give thy thoughts no tongue” but to let the words you desire to speak turn instead back on themselves and grow thick. Speak but brief and natural – the tempest dies before noon. Seek no confirmation. For pride never boasts. Seek also not to praise: we speak fairest when our words are falsest. Be silent as stone; then your ideas will endure.

            “With old friends a word stands for a whole story or set of opinions,” and yes, we must tell stories, and constantly, rehashing them and reestablishing them. There is a balance to silence and it is poetry. Poetry or silence. We tell stories to get closer to their basic structure, their mythic structure. By constantly telling stories we rewrite our memories into stories, our stories into myth, our life into legend. The greater the artist the less fantastic his story. It takes a deep mind to make the everyday world appear deep, and to achieve this, even the most elaborate fantasy looks cheap. Plato’s dialogues outshine the gospels.

            The stories we hear are types for the stories we continually tell, all variations on a theme, the central motif of our own private myth. The myths are yet with us. The enlightenment is as mythic as any religion. We are told a story of the progress of mankind with science as Prometheus; and the entire genre of science fiction explores the outer logic of this myth. The myths about technology and man’s progress make us hum; but the counter-story is just as likely: that man’s extinction will be discovered in a cheap and easy technology anybody can make. What matters with stories and art is not truth, but beauty, what will inspire us to realize the stories? And how can we internalize them as our own?

            All stories begin to take on the same tone, the temperature of the inner climate. And yet we must hold them in, and not wind them away, keep them warm in our hearts oven, till they are boiled to their bare glory, and spoken out with swift and devastating austerity.

To be bright of brain

Let no man boast

The sage and silent

Come seldom to grief

 

            For our friends and enemies bridle us by our tongue. Vanity boasts hopefully, arrogance boasts disdainfully. Pride won’t boast.

 

            By your words are you known. By your words are you destroyed. If three know, thousands will. Let no one discover the matter of your heart. Speak an idea at a time, for others can hardly hear you. Clearness is in distinction. And say only the simple truths that stun the fools who intrude on wisdom’s subtlety. I play the hermetic fool before the world: what have I to do with appearing wise? I speak to my inner nature and am cheered.

            Our best nature, our god nature, the hidden name we may dare to label, call him by an unspoken name a say to smile at the mirror. Evoke him in triumph and defeat. Being wrong and insulted is not ignoble. Owning it is. Attitude is tone of voice. We may even speak of the mere weather and prove yourself a greater man than the eloquent pastor. There is nothing to prove, and therefore, nothing to say. Do the work before you, that is all.

            Beautify and purify your enemies in your speech. Shine your benevolence upon them and cast a halo over their hair. Let them be central, no need to say your own name. Never betray the secrets and sell your soul. Prefer to speak of others. The way to have friends is to show interest in them. You need not distrust them.  The truth wants to be known. Lies tell on themselves. Do not fret a liar, but when the truth is known, show no mercy.

            Yet never flatter. We say the kindest things about those who are dead to us. The more you praise, the less you love. The desire to praise is already a sign of guilt. Instead make your words bold as a promise, and reserve them with glacier’s patience. Do you have to say your way? Keep it. It will be shown by and by.

            Be silent in your work, be silent with your family, digest all experience into the womb of a golden child. You require the endurance of solitude. The philosopher occasionally complains of his solitude the way a wife complains of her husband. Only the foolishly literalistic friend advises her to leave, not knowing that the most tender of loves also loves through complaints, and other such indirect praise. Intense trusts are the children of distrust, faith grows from doubt.

            Speak less, but think the more. Imagination thickens experience with a wide set of expectations. We live many lives by imagining the possibility of this one. An experience of ambiguity feels many possible interpretations at once. Even if an interpretation is false, its possibility is felt and works as if it were true. We don’t have to believe in God or Karma or whatever else. It is enough that somebody somewhere does, and that vicarious belief makes it work as truth for us.

            Strength is silent. Don’t even speak of love. Love is a beautiful weakness. It makes a man dependent. It gives high joys, yet aches, as all dependencies ache. Where there is love, she cannot be hidden, where there is no love, she cannot be faked. Judging from results, love is similar to hatred. Indeed, hate is the skin of love, by which she protects herself. Do you flee from me? I am not surprised, since my heart has already leapt from you in secret. Now I smile to please you because I can hardly stand you. Anxiety is the opposite of sex, angst the opposite of love. Only commitment keeps me through these gaps: I lose most of my friends when I consort with the abyss. This duel thread of love and fear sets the foundation of work and marriage: attitude strings her beads on these. Attitude is tone, attitude is voice, attitude is the source of style.

            My attitude is for friends who resonate to him. My heart calls to those after my heart. Never make love to a partner you wouldn’t want children with. Never pledge yourself to work which denies your art. “Man is cheered by man” the wise Odin said, and yet, there are times to flee from man. Love is a weakness, it is a need we cannot directly fulfill. We must ask, and when we deserve it we may still be denied. Throw your arms around her and she shrieks. Neither pleads nor praises upturn her frown. She stands next to you, but her heart is far.

            So hum silently to yourself, your inner god still shines. Music is the language of emotions. Emotion are music themselves, and we program our emotions through the music and dance of our culture. Blood-music flushes the cheeks like wine. We must learn to be alone to hear the heart’s music. Attention intensifies an experience: we must pay little attention to the world’s distractions. Listen to the inner hum. The way to have friends is to take a genuine interest in others. And yet the love between people makes heart-storms. I myself suffer from heart-storms too often, and can’t seem to drop away, to let go of others as I ought.

My words are finicky seeds

They may thrive in your heart’s garden

-- Perhaps.

If they grow into friendship

-- Rare and dearer for that.

 

I cannot tend my strivers in your bed

I leave you all for that blessed inward

 

If you weed me out in my absence, so long

I must rediscover the rose of my godhood.

 

            And so we turn inwards. In our solitude, we must only kill one foe: boredom. Boredom is the anxiety of desired interest, a lack of invigorating object which takes time’s passing itself as an obsession. Boredom depresses the system, and even alcohol stimulates here to depress there. To find depth in shallow matters is the secret of besting boredom.

 

I’m enthroned on my heart

Moods trapped in glass

A couch to bind

The chaos ocean

 

The glass casts coral inwards

To protect delicate feelings

The breeze feeds basket leaves

To protect the subtle beasts outwards.

 

Oh funnel cloud of inner focus!

You spiral over the same painful thoughts

When will you secure the bed of your joy?

 

At your central eye at last be calm

Ama finds you a God

Be ready to drop duties and loves.

 

            All relationships are a play of power and love. Every word and gesture moves emotion tokens across the chess board. Love is weakness, power strength. A man may have an ivory idol for a wife, and his eyes tickle when he thinks of their love, and yet she will make him bleed as no other could. We need it and yet we cannot control it. Our childhood lives within us like a ring within a tree, and our mother’s love will continue to sap through our veins. We need an escape of love, we need holidays and exceptions. No rule is possible without breaking the rule, no absolute can last with its exception. The romanticism of emotions and infinity must be balanced by non-love, by fear, by power, by the classicism of impersonal control and intelligence. Heart gives substance, mind gives form. And when we are ready to create we must not cry when our friends peel away like petals of a flower. Like a buoy in the bay, push me under and I will next leap the waves. Never mind pleasure and pain. People seek neither happiness nor pleasure, but vitality, and will adapt vices and embrace suffering, though they claim otherwise, if only to feel alive. Not pleasure, but vitality, is the object of life.

            To destroy something, first strengthen it. To leave her, first love her. Human power must control and subdue the heart, and yet be flexible enough to submit, when the heart is ready to explore. All human power comes from the mind’s ability to focus on an object a little longer. The mind is a weak thing, but free enough to slowly build habits. With the swinging of great weights, a small coercion of the will can move mountains. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that habits long established should not be changed for light and transient causes, but when a long train of desires builds up towards the same aim, the power must burst forth and do its work. Only what you always do can you do naturally, and yet interpretation can find precedence of any new habit.

            Focus and volition are the same thing. To focus intently is the full of power. Ideas move autonomously, and the strong will knows how to select or dismiss them. Genius is only persistent attention. Choice of focus makes our world. An easy choice is no choice at all, and the will, which is a mobile nothingness, makes reality by focusing on one thing. We must be torn to be free enough to make a choice. An actual choice implies a real possibility. Emotional ambivalence, which a surge of will could swerve, desire against desire, feeling against feeling, this is how character is smelt.

            Ultimately, the choice career is superfluous to a man’s purpose, if he knows how to prize purpose above the rest. Yet the right choice can compound his interest, strengthen his will, and give him stretches of silence with which to meditate upon his ideas while doing his task. The great man stands on marriage and career: he stands above them. A career is merely a stumbling block when it becomes a thing in itself. Only the purpose is the thing in itself, the rest is distraction.