Tuesday, August 16, 2011

"to do" an essay

Greetings lovers of life and children after my heart! I haven’t worked in so long: hiatus at the job. Been congested with more and more notes, building up more and more ideas, my eyes and mind getting dizzy in complications, and meanwhile I feel like I am floating through the world and its duties without any true grasp of reality. Well this is it, this is the essay on where theory meets reality, where we actually plan our days: an essay about the to do list. This is the final section about the strategy of order, another way to win at the game. After this I go on to the strategy of direct speech.

 

Take care, caretakers!

 

Dani

 

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7. To-do

                A child is done being raised when he is able and willing to continue raising himself; a student is done being taught when she is able and willing to continue teaching herself. All other cases are spoiled, and only justified by the others who succeed. Consider yourself prepared for life when you are able and willing to prepare for it every day. All hail the to-do list!

                The movie KillBill, ridiculous though it is, illustrates the power of the to-do list. The plot of both parts of the movie are structured around a to-do list -- specifically, a hit list. It is as if the assassin in the movie, the heroine, had smuggled a steel leaf from the book of fate, and written her list on this, so that the people she planned to kill to exact her revenge for nearly being killed herself would be finished against all odds, even though this meant defeating over a hundred trained ninjas with her bare sword, as if by the same mandate which the Arabs hold sacred when they say that God has written the time of your death in the book of life, and nothing in the world can alter it. Regard your to-do with equal reverence.

                Ideally, we should use our fine eye on the details, and our Odin eye on the big picture; when we set down our goals for life -- we should have a separate blank book for this! -- we ought to plan today, this week, this month, this year, this decade, every decade of our life, and our place in world history, all more or less simultaneously, since we participate in each of the concentric spheres simultaneously.

                When you make your to-do list, remember to tax yourself daily. First plan the must-be-dones, and fit in the extras around them, like a stuffed car trunk which already holds the big bookshelves, and can yet fit the extra small things, shoes, books, plates, so that when you are moving to your new house, you only need to make a few trips.

                My daily doings are structured like the United States government—I balance power against power, drive against drive, to keep them strong and fighting. My to-do list is the Executive Branch, by which I put my laws into practice; my journal and letters to friends the Judicial branch, by which I judge my actions; and my goal sheets the Legislative, by which I set new laws. Letting my sayings and writings incarnate into the daily to-do is their fullest flower, their mundane incarnation. Let a man say what he will, but what he does is the shine of his words.

                Don't start a thing until you have planned how to end it. Start each project with the end in mind. First, plan just a smudge, then throw yourself into your task, and then emerge again, like a diver to the surface, to really plan it, because now you've broken the temptation to procrastinate, and felt firsthand how long the project will take.

                Tax yourself daily, and tax as the government taxes. You get a paycheck, and it is taxed by an income tax. You spend your money and you are taxed again, not only on the sales tax, but also implicitly in the cost of the product, for the manufacturers of, say, your car, had to pay every manner of tax on each part, for each laborer, on each transport and process, every step of the way. Who knows but that the car you bought is mostly tax? Well then, know how to tax all the things you do, the things you were going to do anyway, so that you can not only, wash the dishes, but spend a little extra time on them and listen to a college lecture on audio while you do so. Or not just go to the store, but ride your bike so you can also get exercise. The question is not only "what is the most expedient manner to do this one thing?" but "how can I do this one thing so that it can accomplish more than one goal?” Kill a dozen birds with one stone.

                Draw your to-do list from your context. Do what fits correctly to the environment, just as a Wright building grows from considering the geography of its place. Incorporate your context into the big picture. Take a rock from the yard to use as a paper weight. Take a quote from your friend and make it into a slogan. Be generous and use some materials from your immediate environment. You thus honor it as worthy of being incorporated into your life work. The popular sitcom "Grey's Anatomy" tells the story of a dozen or so surgeons and doctors sharing a hospital. The show uses a plot device where some general hospital incident -- say, a very fat man needs surgery -- serves as the center of gravity for and commentary upon the various side-plots of each character. In the same way, let the day-to-day unpredictability of life feed back into your planning; let chance be mastered, bridle that horse, make him do his work as well. Must an urge or drive cost  you effort? Well make your prisoners earn their keep!

                The big picture must be appreciated to put the daily doings in proportional context. Even the most perfect assortment of parts are awkward and ugly without the determining big picture. If the paintings of Raphael were chopped up and put back together by Picasso, they would never again be beautiful. Pandora was the archetypical woman not only because she had perfectly made parts, each handcrafted by a certain god or goddess, but because the knot that tied them all together -- feminine curiosity – was put there by Zeus himself. Write at the top of your list, therefore, the theme for the day, the name for the day. In this, planning is like drawing, cutting, lifting, or dancing, in which the best execution is in grand graceful sweeps, in pauseless confident gestures.

                Do well and the world will do you well; be harmless and you won't be harmed. For great pride never advertises. Trust me and I will be before your eyes trustworthy. Each man is in reciprocation with his world. He is a new center, and the more centered on himself he is, the more others gladly orbit him. It is true that intelligence seeks its level, and so it will flow into the minds of all others who hear. Be wise, therefore, in your prudence: impose simple order on your day, a routine to abide by. Emerson would awake at 4:30 a.m. each day, write letters to his friends, and make perfectly wrought sentences in his journal, which amassed like wealth, ready to spend into his essays. You can't beat a man at his own game. Find a system that works for you -- nobody else's will.

                Find yourself a notebook for your goals. On the first page, write your life goal; on the second page, write a breakdown of your goals for each decade of  your life; on the third page, write your goals for this decade; on the fourth page write your goals for this year; on the fifth page, write your goals for this month. With such a scaffolding, your daily todo will fall into its inevitable place.

 

 

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Perfection

Is

Easy

 

perfectidius.com

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Friday, August 12, 2011

"the resonator" a short section

A short section for a theme I have developed at length somewhere else, yet necessary to put in my section about order: it is the spirit, or the voice of man, which orders the body. Odin as archetype for human will is a centerpoint trope for me. With the next section, which is the best for the section on order, I will end it and come to the next strategy. See it tomorrow!

 

Dani

 

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6. Resonator

            The inner voice imitates the spoken voice: how we speak to ourselves is the same as how we may speak to others. How useful therefore to speak to yourself in a resonating inner voice! For with such a slow, commanding, powerful voice, we are like soldiers driven by our captain: we would rather die than disappoint him. His presence of will assuages all fear, and we are able to keep our head in crisis and do the thing we are set to do.

            Mythologically, the Poet God is Odin, who discovered the Runes, who gained wisdom at every turn, whose names are “the Penetrator” and the “Resonator.” This is an allegory for the conscious will within each person's mind. To speak to yourself with such a voice, to develop the I to speak it, requires practice.

 

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Perfection

Is

Easy

 

perfectidius.com

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Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Who is Ama? -- a poem


Who is Ama?



I’ve swallowed the knot
With enough cramps
I’ll lay it straight.

Certain turns of mood
Like tumblers, fall lawfully
to open at last the deeper energy

Such sweat and fury
Such doubts and pains
To formulate one simple name

My semen ink of semantic sink
The whirling wind of my eversong
My fury of demands
and grand volleys and bursts
Electric lisp,
hurricane whisper in centermost eye
sky sigh apocalyptic pent and passion
soft as the breast of the Dove!

Oh my angels!
Oh Fauns of dawn
My weirding girls
Lick with love the light of my palms
These pages of patience
I unfold for you
Who emanate from my manic mind
You are pure godsong
Oh my darlings!

Tell me, where is my equal?
Where is my love
My only other, Ama!
Ama, a shard of your soul is in my child
A shard of your mind is in my lover
A mirror shard in all who draw me
But your centermost manifestation
is too terrible to hold
While I still lie in this infant form

Come sheer Goddess!
Speak to me from within my mirror
Near and signal is your otherly voice
Silent and intimate as the pulse in my ear
For you my heart blossoms
Into the infinite rose
Twin born spirit of my heart
You are The Universe I chose!

Vivoce, Ama Amour, aloo allee!

"intellectual cleanliness" a section of an essay

These are short sections of my essay, and I am trying to get through them all very quickly so I can turn my attention on “The Writing Life,” the next essay I am working on. This section is about intellectual cleanliness, or more specifically, how to use language very carefully. It is especially important when Allists play the Game to use language in a careful and clean way, otherwise confusion and obscurity will drown us.

 

Daniel

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5. Intellectual Cleanliness

 

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                Just as you or I could apply every adjective yet invented to correctly describe some aspect of each our own being, so that you and I are sorts of microcosms in ourselves, so too can every adjective be spiritualized and taken in a higher metaphorical sense. It was Emerson’s trope fountain to see Nature as a mirror of the human soul, and natural science an indirect psychology. With Allism we take every form, every topic fit to study, every ology, and become panologists, studying all things, and integrating them. Is it not necessary, therefore, since no material is foreign to us, and since we touch both living and dead metaphors, for us to wash our hands and practice a rigid – almost priestly – form of purity? Not that I would impose anything specific over the rest, but only that you or I must be utterly pure in our own viewpoint, for the final judge of self is self. Intellectual cleanliness means keeping separate ideas separate, means finding our key terms and defining them absolutely, and absolutely holding to them.  A metaphor is not literal; taken literally it corrupts good thinking.

All ideas can be spiritualized, in the same manner as the old religious laws as described in the Torah or the Vedas were spiritualized by the Prophets and Upanishads: what was gross and vulgar, though called "sacred" at the time, need not be practiced – we don’t need to ameliorate the bull! – but “true" sacrifice is a penitent heart; or to quote Paul, God doesn’t want us to be circumcised, but for our “heart to be circumcised.” This is a bit of legalism to redeem vulgar practices, but the Prophets have needed to be spiritualized yet again, and the gospel has been so sublimated by the pastors and preachers over the millennia, the words of Paul explained away, that we can no longer read these books with fresh eyes. Whether we’ve been to church or not, we’ve absorbed a culture that has felt the diffusion of these interpretive ideas into just about every person who shares the language. For language is a universal solvent, and ideas bleed into everything. Is it any wonder that we require intellectual as well as spiritual purity?

                You gain intellectual purity through inventing and defending a rigid technical jargon for whatever topic you wish to approach. Just as every living thing has been given a Latin name, every body part a Latin name, so too do philosophers drop the common words – love, truth, desire, God, Man – and create new terms, perhaps even coining words, to get at the ideas they are thinking and avoid wasting too much breath on explaining that “by this word I don’t mean the common meaning, but this specific meaning.” Society, with its lazy fascination with specific terms, is nevertheless ever plotting against this elitist jargon. For example, psychoanalytic terms have been so mainstreamed, so compounded with folk psychology, that whatever purity Freud and the others intended for their terms are certainly lost. Whatever an Id or an Unconscious might be, I would have to somehow forget what I know about those ideas if I wanted to study what Freud meant. Language bleeds all upon all, so we must be handy in scripting jargon in order to gain a new approach to ancient ideas.

 

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Perfection

Is

Easy

 

perfectidius.com

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Monday, August 8, 2011

"To read life" a section of an essay

This is the first section of this essay what I will explore at length in another essay, the idea that life is structure like a book, that to order life we can write it as authors, that we can plot our events and work towards the resolution of out goals. Literary criticism becomes a central philosophical viewpoint, a method for approaching all things.

Daniel Christopher June

 

4. To Read Life

Michelangelo - The Sibyl of Delphi.JPG

            Both consciously and unconsciously – that is, allistically – the mind seeks patterns in all it sees. You may have a theory about why your neighbor leaves the house at a certain time every Friday, and consciously think it over, but unconsciously you are weighing up his every step and gesture, and take it in, about that and all things, encyclopedias of information, which are only dumbly felt in the conscious mind. Each speck of dust is infinite, and infinitely interpretable.

            The act of reading life is as complex as the act of reading a book. If only I could read a book for half an hour, and record every mental process on every level, so that I could study this at leisure and figure out the go and way of my thinking. In each book there are lines and circles running through like blue in red marble. The geometrical ideas implied by concepts form a hidden image and this is present in every reading. There are levels of imagination to every novel; the picturesque is only the most obvious layer; deeper still are layers which cannot be seen without special methods of meditation, though we all feel them and are moved. As every overtone of the violin is heard, though not consciously differentiated, so every aspect of life is infinitely subtle until we know how to read it.

            The living genre is that work of art a society puts most focus upon. The ancients held the living genre of myths, stories of the gods; the not-so ancients held the living genre of legends, stories of demigods and heroes; the last few centuries have held the living genre of novels, stories of every day people and their inner world; today we hold the genre of the cinema, dioramas of perfect visual expressions, emphasizing the close-up and the well-framed. The reduction from the universal archetype down to the specific instance parallels the reduction of theocracy down to the present day democracy: our government is of, by, and for the average man.

            The forms we daily live with inform those we daily make. Because I am an American living in the 21st century, I will write a certain way; not merely do I write in American English, but I write in a certain mode of American. The events that surround me, the “War Against Terror” which this nation has wrought against the attacks of 9-11, the threat of communist China, the never-ending daily blah-blah-blah of the news, inform me despite my disinterest. I must accept such things, must accept them unconsciously, allistically, even if consciously I attempt to avoid such newspaper gossip.

            I take my daily life, my work life, family life, and reading life, as the eternal triad of tropic concerns. For the Transcendentalists, the study of nature was the trope fountain, to discover metaphors for human nature in the emerging natural sciences. Once we have discovered our field of study, and once we have hammered out our archetypal ideas, books pour from our hands as if our fingers were pens and pencils, or as if we bled ink.


 

 

 

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Perfection

Is

Easy

 

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Friday, August 5, 2011

"gross strucuring" a section of an essay

The section on Order marches on. Now we come to the ability  to see the big picture, the wide outlines of life, the broad angles. The ability to see the whole thing and break it down into a minimum of large units is helpful in reading and studying, both books and life in general.

 

Daniel Christopher June

 

 

 

 

3. Gross Structuring

 

            To impose order upon your full life, to plan what every decade is for, to subordinate full years to higher goals, to see the full lay of your friends as so many players in a multigenerational drama, to see how all things fit together, and again,  to see how a book fits together, how all its chapters express one basic idea, requires the ability to gross-structure.

            Gross structuring is the ability to outline and anatomize wide arrays of information. To be able to internalize broad topics requires an open, passive, observant mind, which then chews all into bits for digestion.

            The All and the One are the parameters of philosophy, the extremes – and how can we know a thing without knowing its limits? The individual and the everything are two ends of a spectrum. Everything balances, everything compensates, everything is made of the same basic stuff, everything follows the eternal laws.

            The basic structure of thought is the sentence. Each sentence gives an effect, a unique experience. Yet the paragraph is a sort of sentence, and the chapter a sort of sentence, and the entire book a single sentence, and all the books a writer composed coalesce into one sentence, and the full genre another sentence, and all books combined are variations of the same book, the self-same sentence.

            To get at the logic of a sentence, or any number of chapters, reduce them to permutations of the same perms. for instance, there is this theological blunder that goes by the name of the “Argument by Design” for God’s existence which runs like this:

When a man sees a wristwatch lying on a rock, he knows that the rock is natural, but the wristwatch is intelligently designed. Well if we study nature, we will see that it is much more complicated than a wristwatch, and therefore also needed to be intelligently designed.

            The argument cheats in this way: to rephrase the idea, it says, “Designed things such as watches are different than natural things such as rocks. Natural things are complicated, therefore they are as designed things as watches.” It is as if the argument forgets about its analogy with the rock when it goes on to say, “because watches are designed, so are rocks,” in which case, we end up with everything being designed, and therefore, nothing is not designed, and therefore, any observation about design is superfluous anyway, since we cannot find anything that lacks design. Again, it is as if it were saying that design were “unnatural” (artificially created by humans, or supernaturally created by God) and then showing that all of nature is already designed. Since humans are bits of nature, and we have creative properties, why not project those creative properties upon the universe as a whole? We at least have it! The universe is self-created, and all creativity is by the laws of the universe. In this way, our fine structures of rocks and watches are not negated by the gross structure of the universe as a whole. We can therefore see how effective a gross structuring is in how it negotiates between the part and the whole.

            The gross structure that each worldview imagines for the universe is also related implicitly to an attitude toward the gross structure of how every other worldview is wrong: every religion has a theory of the other religions. Worldviews belong to specific cultures, and any given culture holds a dozen alternative worldviews at the same time, each in relation to each other. The cults do not threaten the established religions; they reinforce them. The meta-structure, the gross-structure of Allism, is therefore between all worldviews in relation to the others. Each religion cuts up space and time with sacred places and holidays. For us Allists, our sacred place and time is in our own birthplace, our own birthday, our own relationship to all those other places and times; and what is sacred is that place in the structure where we find our own private peace. The question becomes, 'How do we structure our lives and habits in order to sacrosanct what is holy to us, how do we keep sacred our private integrity? How can we worship a god that nobody has ever heard of?' We do this by hushing about our joy, never sharing it, but overlapping it with all the others, so that the external form coincides, but the internal form is completely different. We may choose our own holidays, and also celebrate the others by our own lights.

            Every artwork, every novel, assumes a norm, and stages a deviation. The book sets up its world only in order to defy it: Winston Smith is against Big Brother, Satan just fell out of Milton’s heaven, Odin hears a prophecy of the Twilight of the Gods. Nothing can be unique unless the rest remains normal. Know how to structure your life so that you can be alone with your inner divinity, know how to spend time meditating, thinking, and talking with Ama. Structure it all, and know how to intuit structure.

            Even better than consciously, we unconsciously pick up on structures. Most of my classmates and coworkers are smarter than me in that they can pick up on expectations, requirements, and assignments quickly. I both lack imagination and lack intuition, and thus must consciously grope for what they so readily pick up. Yet we all assume structures immediately, so that without musical training, we know when music deviates from its structure, when it bends the rules, when it surprises us. The five year old knows all the rules of grammar without even knowing what the word “adverb” refers to.

            To take from these intuitive instances, to form a theory, and create an institution, allows everybody to tweak his unconscious with the unconsciousness of others, so that we breath in the group spirit, and drink in the group soul. We live together, we share this city, we start to fall into step, our rhythms flux and transfigure each others, we take on the atmosphere, imitate the weather, and slowly come to fit into our world. Soon, my world lives for me, I need only set myself within it. And so institutions crystallize our functions: my marriage loves for me, whether I feel it or not, the church believes for me, whether I believe or doubt. How the celebrities amuse us, and for this very reason. They act out our fantasies, for though each man embodies all the others, he isn’t aware of it until he sees it, so that whether he approves or disapproves of what he sees, he has done that very same thing himself by mere contemplation.

            We each come to represent some set of facts for the world, to embody some aspect of Nature’s design. A great event pushes the sensitive up, as if they were fountain heads, who then pours emotion over all the others. We are all jailed with the criminal, we are all institutionalized with the insane, we are all killed in war, we are all famous with celebrities. By merely caring we participate in their nature.

            We are individually men, and as groups we are bodies of men. The average needs of people in a given location summon the appropriate fulfillment, the way, say, an increase in traffic at a certain intersection will summon the emergence of a gas station, or a mini-mall, or whatever else, because it is collectively felt; for as the population grows, the opportunists, as ubiquitous as the spores of a fungus, immediately spring up and settle there, even though to the individual involved, it is an act of pure caprice, will, self-assertion, and unique personal expression.

            It takes wisdom and cunning to see such an opportunity, yet foolishness too has its uses. It takes the foolish man longer to learn things, and yet how wise is foolishness! Only a truly useless person has the chance to be great. Be too useful, too agreeable, too quick witted, and how quickly the group body puts you to work. But stupid, be obstinate, be unteachable, be thoroughly useless, and you will have a right to your independence. Nobody bothers yonder boulder: it is too wide to move, too ugly to break up, it isn’t worth bothering with: let it alone, let it grow wise and sublime in the face of our indifference.

            Where we stand is the best lookout point for what belongs for us to see. Nietzsche complained that Emerson lacked a disciplined study of science. The American mind is literal, as real as yours or mine, but thinks over the centuries, and thinks through you and me. No doubt Emerson is the center of it, as founding of a father as Washington or Jefferson. Our mind slowly builds on disciplines and tradition, we slowly come to accept our place as righteous, to see finally that whoever is born on American soil can never touch hell, but is instantly assured of heaven, and that our founding place is not in ancient traditions, not until we ourselves are ancient, but by right belong to the undisciplined and original minds of Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau. Our central situation is to join this place, to add our own words, better words, and thus to honor the teachers who went before. They were undisciplined because they founded disciplines. we can do more because we also have them, and they are our nation's own.

            And so, we love our place, even if we complain. Stereotyped complaints are a sort of praise, a comfort, a way of keeping things the way they are. Do we complain of our place and time? Then we must love it. But if we praised them, that is true hate, and true war, and we would invite revolution. We can make a purpose of either love of hate so long as we believe in our purpose.

            Structure your books, your studies, your friends, your life, in terms of how they energize your purpose. That thing that your life lives for, how do all your days and doings relate to that? Only when you know this can you hold any meaningful evaluation about the merits of this day or that, or this suffering or that. Every experience must both pay for itself, give an immediate result, be used instantly, and also give a long term result, a future result, the way animal life evolved eyes, with a little bit of light sensitive skin giving immediate evolutionary payoff – how else would the creature be selected to pass it on? – while yet building up over the millennia to a great pair of seers. Let every day enlighten you, and let the sum of your days enlighten you even more. You have never lost and never failed where you still have learned, and even the greatest of setbacks can open greater joys. There is no final evil in all the universe, not death, not suicide, not rape, not warfare, for your innermost is made of joy, is incorruptible, is sacrosanct, and lives forever. Any man may doubt this with his mouth, but no man, woman, or child, can doubt this with his being. When Socrates said that no man could do him harm but himself, we all intuitively sense the wisdom of this, and respect him as among the noblest of ancients. I don’t care if a man is tortured to death or what else: I may avenge him, but I will never pity him, nor the other one over there, nor least of all myself, for I know my worth, and know that there is nothing pitiable about who I really am, and nothing possible to be victimized in my true self. This God or that may die for my sins, but what I truly am can never die, can never be lost, and can never be saved. Did you sweat blood for something as superficial as my bad habits? Let me sweat my own blood, it will do me good. My own life to me is worth more than the blood of many gods, and nothing you do or give or promise could warrant ownership, possession, or even any right to influence my inner being. Worry about your own soul – you have reason to!

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

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Monday, August 1, 2011

"essencing" a section of an essay

Hello friends! Well I am burning through this essay, which is mostly done: I’m sending out a section every two days. This next part of the section on Order regards Essencing, or how to see an essence in any thing, to be able to extract what essence we need from it, for us precedes essence. It is useful for daily life, love, work, and the Game to be able to posit an essence into a thing in order to get something out of.

 

I have been DEEP into the Natamyths, preparing them for publication. Maybe a few weeks of intense editing will make it ready?

 

Daniel

 

 

2. Essencing

 

Raffaello - Stanze Vaticane - The School of Athens (detail) [01].jpg

            Understanding is the ability to say an idea in your own words; comprehension is the ability to summarize it. Nobody can understand nor comprehend what is completely beyond his experience. To be able to put a thing in order is to enumerate all its parts in terms of an essence, asking “What is essential to this system, to this structure, to this thing, without which, it would be changed beyond self-identity?” The answer is by no means obvious. To be able to discern between trivialities and essences is the mark of wisdom: open-mindedness is a virtue of the child; the wise man carefully filters out everything except the heart of the matter.

            The ability to see an essence, to understand it, to comprehend it, distinguishes the true philosopher: in this, Plato and Nietzsche are two greatest masters. The ability to formulate an idea, to give it a nickname, a handle, requires the greatest wit, the same sort of wit required to tell a joke. The scholars and geniuses do it all the time, but for a people as a whole to be wise and deep, this requires custom, just as every novelty requires a regularity, and every freedom requires a tradition.

            Myths get at an essence, abbreviate generations of experience, transmit and perfect that experience to open each new generation to the same. The Iliad is similar to Genesis, and the Greek myths similar to the Hindu. Yet what each set of myths did for them, the Greek myths, the Jewish myths, the Hindu myths, is summarize and transmit generations' worth of experience. Though we may read Genesis, or the Odyssey, or the Ramayana, with great joy and insight, it can never move us to the core of our national identity, being the myths of other peoples, just as I may respect and admire your children, but not as much as my own, no matter how my children compare to yours. Drink from your roots. We love best only what we are part of: no people chooses another people as “God’s chosen,” but every people centralizes on itself. Only a decadent would advise Europeans not to be “Eurocentric.” If my kidneys aspired to be hearts, imagining the heart to be more noble, then I would die from blood poisoning. For us Americans, who are something new under the sun, we must constantly rehash and improve our own stories, build our own citadel, strengthen our national originals, and use the literature of the rest of the world only as a foil, as an enemy, which once we have wrestled against, we must devour to take its strength into our own original flesh. Love Jesus as Judas loved him and you will become greater than him.

            The great minds abbreviate the past, epitomize the present, and open the future. The past therefore requires constant compression, and really exists nowhere else but in our guts, in the digesting of this compressed story. We must internalize all things, and center them around us, so that all history is a commentary on my present  life, the full of human history mere prelude to my place now, for this is it, I am the divine being, I am God in the flesh--let any government in existence serve me! My divinity is in the spirit of my style.

            Style is the face of essence. Every style has a grammar, and every style of grammar is an ontology. How I set my nouns, verbs, and prepositions is how I focus my eyes and where I place them. The full sentence is a structure of logical relationships; language is metaphysics; every sentence implies a philosophy, and the very nature of language is to subsume and transmit the thinking of all men who speak into the same omniscience, the all knowing mind of Lux Sophia, goddess of language. For the great mind, he sees all sentences as allegorical, all well-formed structures denoting and connoting their subject in their very form, and also in the music and the words. The masters do it best, and as for the Master of Language, he is the reason why the world was created in the first place.

            Hold the mirror to nature with your art, and hold the mirror of art to itself with your theory. Theory is art reflecting on itself; theory is the structuration of structure. Art becomes profound through the critical apparatus readers build around it. Art sees itself as the object of contemplation. No longer is “the study of nature” our theology, as it was for Emerson and Edison, the latter who took Nature as "the only true God," but we take method itself for a object of method.

            We do not find a heaven of perfect forms, but we make such a heaven. All forms are of one stuff, interchangeable, only their materials differ. Democracy has a structure that could be translated into an opera. To be able to see that an essence is also a form, that the informer transforms the gross structure to its own inner logic, that spirit is form, that soul is form, that all that ever existed was a form of matter and nothing else, we approach the secret of matter, that every last speck of dust is absolute and eternal. We build heaven from the image of this life, as if we had made a collage of our favorite parts of this life and said that those are the most real things, and therefore, by a trope of language, those are the “eternal things” the “final things,” the “true beings of the universe.” “Theology is anthropology,” a German rightly said, and again, “every religion is a flavor of humanism.” We take a thing for what it is worth, and not a cent more. Insofar as God created the world, so he is capable of creating this world, but not necessarily a better one. There is no faking results. What a man does every day is what he will continue to do; the past eternally recurs. As Emerson says in his sublime essay on Compensation: all things have a cost, all things render a benefit, all things compensate, with the exception that knowing that all things compensate, such a knowledge brings only gain without cost, and again, wisdom and virtue and such creations of the soul add to the universe, and only add to it, with no detrimental loss, as Anaxagoras taught, “the Soul is a self increasing Logos.” For if entropy decreases order, it increases experience, and a fully complicated system will be wiser.

            An object is not an object to us, is not real, until we have some idea of its parameters. We know a person by knowing the shape of his soul. The essence of a man is a certain shape our mind takes when considering him. The forms we learn in our youth conform us into adults. For this reason, I constantly devour the American Forms, and take the foreign forms such as Nietzsche's and the Tao's as balancers and placers of what is nearer to my soul.

            The Game of life is knowing the structure of its layers of games, of seeing how they balance, what they center on. Having the widest mind means being able to synthesize the most. Philosophers are gods, yes, and the Universe, when she created herself, was the first philosopher.

 

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Perfection

Is

Easy

 

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