"some notes on love and marriage" first thoughts for an essay

Okay, I’ve been doing this marriage thing for a while, and since I analyze everything in my life, even my own analyzing, yes I have drawn some preliminary conclusions about the nature of love, romance, and marriage. Here they are!

 

Daniel Christopher June

 

Some notes on Love and Marriage

 

 

 

Ah my dream girl, you are so much like me! Born in a library, and never far from your home, a homebody and literati like me. You are a passionate poet and a keen eyed philosopher, and know a great writer when you see one. You see me. You encourage me and also challenge me…

            The hypostasis of a dream girl or dream boy is to seal off the risk in love, the problem that joy requires intimacy and intimacy makes you vulnerable. What is the worst sin? To betray the beloved. Yet there is something liberating in such a betrayal, something soul-necessary in escaping the one who loves you most, knows you must. Love suffocates. Knowledge and power insist on distance. And really, the soul needs both: intimacy and distance, love and defense. We need to grow, and growing means casting off your shell, casting off the cushion-chains of comfort, of breaking bonds and bounds and also vows. Yet is not the marriage vow the weightiest vow of them all. We may take the Hippocratic oath, we may swear to do our duty, but there is honor and there is intimacy. Something deeper sinks in the legalizing of intimacy, in the sanctified such of marital bliss.

            Legalism, which is such a peculiar magical use of language, a computer programming of human relationships – who could imagine such a thing is possible? The small print is not written by inspiration, but is guided by thousands and hundreds of thousands of court-cases, endless jail time, fines, fees, and every mode and order of argument, stipulation, and the challenging of ambiguity. The legal system as we know it was invented by the Romans, necessarily by them, the first world empire. They needed law to control their world. Their creation is a mental and social technology equal to the myths we created for ten thousand years, the religions we created for two thousand years, and every mode of art which for the same. These spontaneous acts we do each day are allowed, created, put on the artificial platform of a the ratiocreative work of a thousand generations.

            Vow’s of love are meant to be broken. The highschool sweetheart vows on the moon and the tides, and the trees and the wide blue sky that her love will be eternal. She wishes to prove love with reference to truth. Such folly! Truth and love are different orders entirely, antithetical even. Love lacks the distance and objectivity to speak the truth. Love is blind in that he only sees what he wants to see.

            Love isn’t even sufficient unto itself. The couple must share goals beyond each other. How selfless it must seem to love so utterly another person. How selfless to advertise to the world endlessly how perfect your lover is, how eternal her form, how perfect her mind. What pure humility, with no trace of egotism, it is to write eloquent versus about the dip in her lip or the sink at the base of her neck. And when the couple is finally edged together into holy matrimony, to the relief of every set of friends – who were not at all annoyed at the endless outpour of mutual praise and breathless delight the couple shared, but merely concerned that if the law doesn’t step in, true love might get away – then the praise of lover to lover turns to complaint. It might seem vicious, the way some husbands, but mostly wives, go on about their spouses. At first it’s a little shocking. You  -- don’t like him? Oh you do…but then? What isn’t apparent is that this chain of complaints is just a second way of praising the relationship. Lovers quarrels are forms of flirtation, lover’s complaints are assurances of intimacy. And again, the wedding couple needs some sort of identity outside the relationships, some recourse to the maiden name in the wife, some recourse to the bachelor freedom in the husband. As always, language creates worlds. When the husband is with his friends, his words can exile the phantom of the wife with a few gently disparaging remarks. Her spiritual presence, which he can scarcely escape – even when she’s at work, he feels her yelling at him for not rinsing his dishes, or putting his laundry in the hamper, or whatever else – is cast away by the magic of language, so that he is free. And this isn’t betrayal. Or if it is, then it’s the necessary betrayal for sustained intimacy.

            To share this house together, to share it for days and nights, weeks and months, forever. To constantly critique each other’s behaviors, to analyze each other’s moods, to be every wary that she doesn’t real love me anymore, that he doesn’t real care for me like he used to, to like a sleuth look for clues or evidence of any dishonesty or infidelity, to keep a keen eye also on all the other male threats in the neighborhood, at the gas-stations, in the streets, who espy a woman of such incomparable beauty and grace (if only they knew her!), and again to recall every holiday, to learn by heart the entire code of “things not to bring up,” and “index of my touchy subjects,” – yes, yes, a little distance is sometimes called for.

            Are the couple happy? Happy as they can be. Happily ever after is the normal state of affairs, at least half the marriages go this way, only happily ever after has the same sufferings, fights, and furies that single ever after would also have. If marriage was the cure for life’s sufferings, then why did Buddha escape?

            Happiness cannot be directly sought. Some goods are only achieved when you are attempting something else. Happiness and love are rewards, not goals, and when they are sought directly, the ever allude. You become first desperate and then anxious, and then whose going to want to date you then? Love makes this rule: if you need love, you can’t have it. This reminds me the eloquent situation I found myself in during adolescence: you need a car to get t your job, you need a job to buy your car. Kinda like the poverty trap: you need money to make money, which is a double trap, because for most impoverished people, they couldn’t make money even if they did have it.

            Love is by nature transgressive. There is some complicity between each couple, they are denying the world, casting off duty and society for each other. Love is crime. And being wed in crime, not only loving each other, but sharing a guilt, the couple knit their souls to each other. The constant exposure, the ever intensive mutual commentary, makes the couple double. Even if they don’t more and more resemble each other, till people initially think they are brother and sister, and cringe when they kiss, still the man becomes more what his wife wants him to be, and the wife become more what the man wants too.

            I mean what the spouses really want, not what they say they want. Love is a game, like all things are. If you have a bad habit, I can hold that over you for all your life. If we get in a dispute, I don’t even have to bring up your vices and mistakes, I need merely give you that look, and we both know that I have the moral high ground. But then you get some dirt on me, and know we both have ammunition. The dialect of the husband and wife, so inscrutable and impenetrable, that nobody on the outside can get it, is nuanced, intimate, and infinite. Where do you think Socrates learned his dialectic? From the ever pleasant wife at home, who with her constant disputes and demands, drove the man to philosophy, though he would later blame a God.

            Spouses don’t even regret each other’s follies and mistakes, they fully love them. “Nobody will steal you from me, because look at this fault.” And as religion has always put the golden ring of morality in the nose of the bull – to lead our strength by our weakness, so do couples manipulate each other through accusatory speech. There is so much harmless blackmail in all conversations. Embaress your brother in front of his girlfriend, and somehow in the conversation, he will accidently bring up one of your embaressing flaws. Blackmail, promise, innuendo, layers upon layer so fit, characterize all talk and conversation. Not only what comes out of the mouth, but the shape of the mouth, the wrinkle of the eye. We communicate more than we know, and others understand those things, sometimes also not knowing how or why, or even knowing that they know at all. A mere glance and I have your life story. And for the wife or husband who has you figured out, when you actually start to correct your vices, become a better person, mature, that’s when she gets nervous. Now she’s afraid. The husband starts going to the gym. Whose he trying to impress? The wife starts appraising herself in the mirror. He’s getting more attractive – are we still evenly matched? Will he resent me, will he carefully suggest that he could, if he wanted, do better, and therefore manipulate me? I think I’m going to go on a diet. And I knew a man who once he found religion and ceased many of his bad habits, found that his girlfriend mysteriously cheated on him. Why? To escape him! Her official justification of course was something else. We want somebody we are comfortable with. Here you go changing things, changing the rules, treating me – nice! Even if you are suddenly kind and loving and perfect to me, I am now deathly afraid. It seems that if the marriage is to survive, the couple must grow together.

            Love grows in commitment, and commitment is secured by duty. In this the couple matures. Maturity is frustration tolerance. Deny the child the candy bar and she stomps and howls and demands justice from heaven. An old man, if he kept on track, can patiently lose the use of many organs, be insulted by his ungrateful children, be retired early, despite his wishes, but never complain – you would never guess! – and its more than stoicism, but it is the indispensible form of intelligence called patience. I sometimes think there is no intelligence at all where there is no patience.

            Lovers speak a language that nobody knows. How annoying the wife or girlfriend who seeks sympathy for supposed abuse or cruelty from the spouse. It is easy to impress others with how horrible a spouse is, quoting them out of context, and no amount of context filling is possible: the relationship is not between two people, but the two are one, the are in it together. The whole thing is necessary, and event the accents of freedom are merely to create a firmer union between the two. Lack the black I, I don’t want to listen. And you, adulteress man, whose wife just doesn’t get him, who has to supplement, I know you do that to keep your marriage in place, but I tell you this: whether you get caught or not, the relationship is altered. It is different because you are different, and she doesn’t have to know, you don’t have to confess, for your character is different through and through, and it changes not just some things, but everything. Nor can you repent out of it. What is done now is done forever. Do a deed and you are forever the man who did it. Your muscles learn of it, your nerves are tweaked by it.

            Its not all bad. Instead of “repentances” we have “learning from mistakes,” and “compensating for past wrongs.” You can grow stronger, you can improve, from every area, in every way.

            A mature love is a dance, and both partners move together. Either you grow together or you grow apart. You must talk, every day, challenge each other and affirm each other. Words aren’t the only way to speak, but every thing you do is a form of language. One hasn’t said a thing by mouthing the worse. Context and sincerity say the truths you mean, and you are limited in what truths and beauties you can mean. I don’t care if you have found the most beautiful poem in the world, it will fall flat from your lips unless you are equal to it, unless the time and the place are receptive to it. Endless theories, mounds of advice won’t avail. Therapy will never avail. Any educated fool can speculate on high matters in complicated jargon – its easy. To say the same truths in your own voice, to speak simple, basic, comprehensive truths, is not the mark of intelligence, but of wisdom. Wisdom is the maturing of intelligence, but I would say even simplicity can achieve such wisdom. Simple linear communication may not be your forte, sir professor, but when you achieve it, you will no longer be a scholar but a sage.

            Two speakers face each other. Language is crystallized desire, the tongue is liquid, the air melts with their intentions. Each speaker has his or her own speech. They want to influence each other. Their desires are some mixture of love and fear, or intimacy and distance, or sex and power – it is in everything we say, though euphemized, though riddled away. Not only do I as a speaker address you as a speaker, but I address myself to my own language, and my language to yours, and you to your langauge, and your langauge to mine. Our languages can be at odds, we can be speaking different modalities. Every language has a tone, which evokes a layer of the heart. If I whisper and talk tenderly, the entire room is different. We are in a different world. We square shoulders, align hearts, and look upon the other face to face. We have created a rendezvous. With the right words we can sink deeper into our world, or go out of it. We can transfer ideas, build powers of distance, impose threats and promises, we can love. When closer and closer, you might suddenly say a casual joke. At this point, that joke stings deep like it would not if we were passing in the street. Each layer of intimacy has different powers.

            When your language subordinates mine, you are showing your power, and making me respect you. When your language has a theory that explains my language and predicts it, then I am in your control. When your psychology anticipates me, you are over me, you are a step away from programming me. I fear you. The relation of my words to yours implies the relationship between me and you, my spirit to yours. It is as if the words were chess pieces, and by twisting out your threats and promises, by exposing your subtle tricks, I undo you, I destroy your strategies and perhaps change your very psychology of me, who you think I am. The spirit is the faculty of language, both the conventional language our our mother tongue, and the language of ideas and feelings each of us has hidden in our hearts, which makes the spoken language in its image.

            A marriage is a sort of conversation. Does an old man simply praise life? He has experienced too much to make simple statements about life. Life is complicated, it is too many things. Ditto marriage. It is a complex interface, a language, the stage of sufferings and joys. It is certainly glorious, but for the single person, alternate glories suffice. In all things, match your outer world to your inner needs and desires, and the desires to your world. Then when you suffer and when you triumph, through all the goods and bads, you will still ever be happy.

 

 

 

 

http://perfectidius.com/bookstore.html

 

 

Nietszche comments on the Allistic style

The studious Daniel June to the students of Life:

 

Greetings!

 

I have written a difficult section about my own style (the allistic style) as it would be seen through Nietzschean eyes. After moving at length to discern what values Nietzsche gave to different styles, I show that this criterion was Nietzsche’s most important standard for evaluating Plato, Christianity, and Wagner – his three main enemies in life. The allistic style is put under his terrible eyes as well…

 

Take care, Caretakers!

 

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Nietzsche comments on the Allistic Style

 

 

            The dynamo of truth versus beauty, at the heart of the heart of Nietzsche’s discourse, plays out, and never settles itself, in the very style of Nietzsche. He was certainly a style-conscious philosopher, the most style-conscious of all the great philosophers, and though Kant maybe said more influential things about beauty and the sublime, he didn’t touch the stuff when he set his pen to the page.

            William James characterized philosophies as so many styles of thought:

Not only Walt Whitman could write “who touches this book touches a man.” The books of all the great philosophers are like so many men. Our sense of an essential personal flavor in each one of them, typical but indescribable, is the finest fruit of our own accomplished philosophic education. What the system pretends to be is a picture of the great universe of God. What it is—and oh so flagrantly!—is the revelation of how intensely odd the personal flavor of some fellow creature is. Once reduced to these terms (and all our philosophies get reduced to them in minds made critical by learning) our commerce with the systems reverts to the informal, to the instinctive human reaction of satisfaction or dislike. We grow as peremptory in our rejection or admission, as when a person presents himself as a candidate for our favor; our verdicts are couched in as simple adjectives of praise or dispraise. We measure the total character of the universe as we feel it, against the flavor of the philosophy proffered us, and one word is enough.

 

            How accurate, how sublime, how self-nullifying! A sentiment worthy of a psychologist cum philosopher. Too bad he nearly nullifies the entire thing with his offhand dismissal of Nietzsche:

The mood of a Schopenhauer or a Nietzsche…though often an ennobling sadness, is almost as often only peevishness running away with the bit between its teeth. The sallies of the two Germans remind one, half the time, of the sick shrieking of two dying rats. They lack the purgatorial note which religious sadness gives forth.

            He lost me by his claim that Schopenhauer and Nietzsche share one mood: how could anything intelligent follow from such a dire clause? James at least gets a few people right, Hegel for instance, and James at least was a great reader, and could only think and philosophize through the texts of others – how scholarly! Yet better than anything the universities have presented since, excluding John Dewey alone. He wrote these words in 1902, to his credit, two years after Nietzsche died. Maybe he didn’t know better?

            For who spoke here, James, or his God? The painful fall of James beautiful ideas is his God, who is his original sin. When his God mutters up and interrupts his philosophy, James seems perhaps a bit, kinda, -- insincere.

            That Nietzsche somewhat resembling Schopenhauer – a bit! – in his early writings isn’t too surprising, since Schopenhauer gave Nietzsche his initial emancipation from Christianity. Nietzsche’s early books, which precede his apotheosis as a stylist, reference Schopenhauer and Wagner in the opposite light the mature Nietzsche would come to. Even his little smatter of notes on “The Tragic Age of the Greeks,” unpublished and brooding, seems a bit sullen, a bit bitter at present day Germany. In this I resonate. I prefer the American Renaissance spirit to the spirit of the resenters now in control of our universities. Nietzsche’s intent with this book was to present a “genuine culture” the genuine culture, the pre-Socratic Greeks, who are characterized like all genuine cultures with a “unity of style.” This “republic of creative minds,” from Thales to Socrates is undone, cheated, corrupted, ruined by Plato:

Plato himself is the first mixed type on a grand scale, expressing his nature in his philosophy no less than his personality. Socrates, Pythagorean and Heraclitic elements are all combined in his doctrine of ideas. This doctrine is not a phenomenon exhibiting a pure philosophic type. As a human being, too, Plato mingles the features of the regal exclusivity and self-contained Heraclitus with the melancholy compassionate and legislative Pythagoras and the psychological acute dialectician Socrates. All subsequent philosophers are such mixed types… the mixed types were founders of sects, and that sectarianism with its institutions and counter-institutions was opposed to Hellenic culture an  its previous unity of style. Such philosophers too sought salvation in their own way, but only for the individual or for a small inside group of friends and disciples. The activity of the older philosophers, on the other hand (though they were quite unconscious of it) tended toward the healing and the purification of the whole. It is the mighty flow of reek culture that shall not be impeded; the terrible dangers in its path shall be cleared away: thus did the philosopher protect and defend his native lang. But later, beginning with Plato, philosophers became exile, conspiring against their fatherlands.

            What Germany needed was a “unity of style which characterizes all its life. Now was this early condemnation of Plato as a stylist the adolescent gumption of an over avid youth. In the final section of Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, entitled “What I owe the ancients,” specifically, in regard to the development of his own personal style, the greatest achievement of Nietzsche in his own eyes and ours, he praises a few Roman writers of the epigamic style – Sallust is praised, as well as Horace, and notably, no mention of the garrulous Cicero is listed. Then he specifically denounces the Greek style, and especially that of Nietzsche’s:

For heaven’s sake, do not throw Plato at me. I am a complete skeptic about Plato, and I have never been able to join in the admiration for the artist Plato which is customary among scholars. In the end, the subtlest judges of taste among the ancients themselves are on my side. Plato, it seems to me, throws all stylistic forms together and is thus a first-rate decadent in style…. To be attracted by the Platonic dialogue, this horrible self-satisfied and childish kind of dialect, one must never have read good French authors.

            Thucydides is than praised not only as a divine contrast to Plato, being the flower of the Sophist’s culture, but he is actually read as an anecdote from reading Plato, much the way Nietzsche refers to The Satyricon, as his fresh air after reading the epistles of Paul.

            The epigrammatic, the strong, severe, the utterly compact, this cheers Nietzsche’s heart and fills his lungs. Music, with tempo, with gallop, this is the art that alone redeems the world “Has it been noticed that music liberates the spirit? Gives wings to thought? that one becomes more of a philosopher the more one becomes a musician?”

            In precisely the same terms by which Nietzsche dismisses Plato, so he dethrones Wagner for his own affections:

If anything in Wagner is interesting it is the logic with which a physiological defect makes move upon move and takes step upon step as practice and procedure, as innovation in principles, as a crisis in taste.

For the present I merely dwell on the question of style.— What is the sign of every literary decadence? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains life at the expense of the whole—the whole is no longer a whole. But this is the simile of every style of decadence: every time, the anarchy of atoms, disintegration of the will, "freedom of the individual," to use moral terms—expanded into a political theory, "equal rights for all." Life, equal vitality, the vibration and exuberance of life pushed back into the smallest forms; the rest, poor in life. Everywhere paralysis, arduousness, torpidity or hostility and chaos: both more and more obvious the higher one ascends in forms of organization. The whole no longer lives at all: it is composite, calculated, artificial, and artifact.—

            Wagner has no full picture, no gestalt master. Despite the panorama views of his drawn out operas – some last for days! – it is in a different direction that Nietzsche sees Wagner’s true greatness:

Once more: Wagner is admirable and gracious only in the invention of what is smallest, in spinning out the details. Here one is entirely justified in proclaiming him a master of the first rank, as our greatest miniaturist in music who crowds into the smallest space an infinity of sense and sweetness. His wealth of colors, of half shadows, of the secrecies of dying light spoils one to such an extent that afterward almost all other musicians seem too robust.

            And once again, Nietzsche condemns the writings of the New Testament, which he finds especially vomitous, in the same terms:

To have glued this New Testament, a kind of rococo of taste in every respect, to the Old Testament to make one book, as the "Bible," as "the book as such"—that is perhaps the greatest audacity and "sin against the spirit" that literary Europe has on its conscience.

…

On the contrary: the history of Christianity - and that from the very death on the Cross - is the history of progressively cruder misunderstanding of an original symbolism.  With every extension of Christianity over even broader, even ruder masses in whom the precondition out of which it was born were more and more lacking, it became increasingly necessary to vulgarize, to barbarize Christianity - it absorbed the doctrines and rites of every subterranean cult of the Imperium Romanum, it absorbed the absurdities of every sort of morbid reason.  The fate of Christianity lies in the necessity for its faith itself to grow as morbid, low and vulgar as the requirements it was intended to satisfy were morbid, low and vulgar.  As the Church, this morbid barbarism itself finally assumes power - the Church, that form of mortal hostility to all integrity, to all loftiness of soul, to discipline of spirit, to all open-hearted and benevolent humanity. - Christian values - noble values: it is only we, we emancipated spirits, who have restored this greatest of all value-antitheses! –

            The Christian church, the style of its scriptures, the absorption of its doctrines, have abiding style, no commanding and subordinating master artist to set it in place. Nietzsche’s great enemies – Wagner, Plato, and Christianity – all share a similarity in style, the “decadent” style. How does one recognize such a style, to know it, to avoid it?

            For surely, he speaks of “’Play,’ the useless-as the ideal of him who is overall of strength, as “childlike.” The ‘childlikeness’ of God as child playing.” This is a reference to Nietzsche’s favorite philosopher, or at least his least ambivalent precursor: Heraclitus, who said god plays the universe like chips on a checker board. Something playful, sarcastic, powerful mocking, innocent, childlike – these characterize Nietzsche’s style, and what he aspired for in his style. Yet there are more terms mixed into his vision.

            He differentiates the apollonian style of visual order versus the Dionysian orgiastic god of intoxication and music. Nietzsche himself was a believer in the God Dionysus, calls himself “the last disciple of Dionysus.” Dreams versus intoxications? Which will win? In the end, Nietzsche’s Dionysus incorporates the Apollonian, who is no longer mentioned, and Dionysus as yes-sayer of life is contrasted against the crucified, the no-sayer of life.

            Further divisions scalpel from his eyes. The classical style as a style of abbreviation and concentration is again the Roman, the grand style, the greatest, without struggle. This he sets up against the Romantic. The classical, the victorious and heroic, is harmonized, and coordinated. And yet the Dionysian is not far: “Artists, if they are any good, are (physically as well) strong, full of surplus energy, powerful animals, sensual; without a certain overheating of the sexual system a Raphael is unthinkable – making music is another way of making children.”

            Unlike the decadent French of the later modernism age (it died in its post-phase), the phallus is no “symbol for castration” but the utmost in power and love combined in creative greatness. The God Cock, the Dionysian riot, quick as thunder, slow as lightening, is henceforth the place and station of the creative great. The aesthetic is the intoxicating is the feeling of powers’ increase is happiness. Power over opposites, the mastery of tensions, the overpowering of violence.

            One may, after all, create art from pain and hate of life, rather than from the gratitude of celebration of the universe. Art can go both ways. The decadent is the life-denying. Nietzsche realizes the connection in aesthetic bliss of “a superabundance of means of communication, together with an extreme receptivity for stimuli and signs.” Not to escape life, but to feel more, to feel her intimately and intensely.

            Not that such an art will be freak and excess. “Every mature art has a host of conventions as its basis – in so far as it is a language. Convention is the condition of great art, not an obstacle.” “One never communicates thoughts: one communicates movements, mimic signs, which we then trace back to thoughts.” Convention is a necessary aid in expressing the subtle. Such explosive creativity, the “compulsion and urge to get rid of the exuberance of inner tension through muscular activity and movements of all kinds” is the artist who flows, who feels what he feels, doesn’t repress, doesn’t defend himself from reality, who loves the universe as his mother. “We possess art lest we perish of the truth,” he says, for art is the transfiguration of raw truth.

            The romantic, however, from a depressed spirit, seeks exciting material, erotica, socialism, external intoxicants and shocks, to revive the overworked, cramped, enfeebled, and weak of art and mind. “Weariness of will; all the greater excesses in the desire to feel, imagine, and dream new things.

            There are no longer the apollonian and the Dionysian, but Dionysus versus the Crucified: “Is art a consequence of dissatisfaction with reality? Or an expression of gratitude for happiness enjoyed? In the former case, romanticism; in the latter, aureole and dithyramb (in short, of apotheosis): Raphael too belongs here; he merely had the falsity to deify what looked like the Christian interpretation of the world He was grateful for existence where it was not  specifically Christian. The moral interpretation makes the world unbearable. Christianity was the attempt to “overcome” the world, to negate it. …which resulted in making man gloomy, small, and impoverished: only the most mediocre and harmless type of man, the herd type, profited by it, was advanced by it, if you like. Homer as an artist of apotheosis, Rubens also. Music has not yet had one. The idealization of the man of great sacrilege (a sense of his greatness) is Greek; deprecation, slandering, contempt for the sinner is Judeo-Christian.”

            And with this new category, apotheotic art, apotheotic philosophy, we are nearing allism. “I ask in each individual case, “has hunger or superabundance become creative here.” This is no matter of whether one chooses eternity and being, or chance and becoming, for the destructive “overfull power pregnant with e future….. “Dionysian.” Can also be the hatred of the apocalypse, which the ill-constituted and underprivileged destroy from resentment. “Externalization” on the other hand, can proceed from gratitude and love – an art of his origin will always be an art of apotheosis, dithyrambic, perhaps, with Rubens, blissful with Hafiz, bight and gracious with Goethe, and shedding a Homeric aureole over all things – but it can also be that tyrannical will of a great sufferer who would like to forge what is most personal, individual, and narrow – most idiosyncratic – in his suffering, into a binding law and compulsion, taking revenge on all things, as it were, by impressing, forcing, and branding into them his image the image of his torture. The latter is romantic pessimism in its most expressive form, whether Shopenhauerian philosphy of wil or as Wagenrian music.” Classical versus Romantic, Noble versus decadent, Dionysus versus the Crucified. It is not a matter if a man is religious or not, but whether he is Christain or pagan.

The two types: Dionysus and the Crucified – To determine: whether the typical religious man [is] a form of decadence (the great innovators are one and all morbid and epileptic); but are we not here omitting one type of religious man, the pagan? Is the pagan cult not a form of thanksgiving and affirmation of life? Must its highest representative not be an apology for and deification of life? The type of a well-constituted and ecstatically overflowing spirit! The type of a spirit that takes into itself and redeems the contradictions and questionable aspects of existence!

It is here I set the Dionysus of the Greeks: the religious affirmation of life, life whole and not denied or in part; (typical – that the sexual act arouses profundity, mystery, reverence).

Dionysus versus the "Crucified": there you have the antithesis. It is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom – it is a difference in the meaning of it. Life itself, its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence, creates torment, destruction, the will to annihilation. In the other case, suffering – the "Crucified as the innocent one" – counts as an objection to this life, as a formula for its condemnation. – One will see that the problem is that of the meaning of suffering: whether a Christian meaning or a tragic meaning. In the former case, it is supposed to be the path to a holy existence; in the latter case, being is counted as holy enough to justify even a monstrous amount of suffering. The tragic man affirms even the harshest suffering: he is sufficiently strong, rich, and capable of deifying to do so. The Christian denies even the happiest lot on earth: he is sufficiently weak, poor, disinherited to suffer life in whatever form he meets it. The god on the cross is a curse on life, a signpost to seek redemption from life; Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction

            This sums it up, all the distinctions, all the forms and types, come down to this distinction: am I grateful for this life, proud of who I am, creative from joy; or am hateful of this “veil of tears,” am I a guilty sinner, do I create things “too good for this world.” This bifurcation, this disjunction between types is the crack of distinction, the divorce and final irreconcilability between the Beautiful versus the Sinners, the Powerful versus the Meek, the Grateful versus the hopeful.

            “Whatever was life in my last forty-four years has been saved, is immortal. The first book of the Revalution of all Values, the Songs of Zarathustra, the Twilight of the idols, my attempt to philosophize with a hammer, -- all presents of this year, indeed of its last quarter! How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life? – and so I tell my life to myself.” Indeed, Nietzsche achieved his apotheosis, and after a miserable death went on to become the abiding God who speaks to us still His is the universe of beauty, the cosmos, “the world as a work of art that gives birth to itself.”

            Who could not be shaken to the core with the triumph and majesty of such a view? How perfect! How sublime! What a laughing child Nietzsche was and always will be! Has not allism long sat student to such a prophet, such a revealer of glory?

            And yet is the allistic style decadent? Thus utter interpenetration of styles, these “allays” which transcend essays, which no longer attempt, but achieve in their very form the joy and triumph the see and breathe, are they not a mixed style? Quite the contrary. The allistic style does indeed absorb everything, it isn’t quite the Emersonian style, which Nietzsche describes as “enlightend, roving, manifold, subtle, and above all happy. One who instinctively nourishes himself only on ambrosia, leaving behind what is indigestible in things. A man of taste. Emerson has that gracious and clever cheerfulness which discourages all seriousness; he simply does not know how old he is already and how young he is still going to be….his spirit always finds reasons for being satisfied and even grateful; and at times he touches on cheerful transcendency.” Indeed, Allism has also sat long under the teaching of the Oversoul, the essays of the Sage of Concord, and also Whitman, and between the three of them, Allism has discovered many perfect tropes. And how dead on is Nietzsche’s insight into Emerson’s style, a man who “read for the glints,” and wrote down in his journals – a holy scripture if ever there was one! – the beautiful ideas, the best moments, the highlights of every man, what is best in the. He could affirm every religion, and like Whitman, exclude none.

            Allism includes the indigestible. Allism includes everything. Like the Master, the allistic style assimilates everything, wide materials, difficult materials, the worst, the most horrible, and digests them long and well, only to give birth to Baldr, the beautiful and perfect God of tomorrow. Yes, the methods of Allism are to study with the divine intensity of all the worlds wisdoms in order, not to end death, but to rescue from death a future beauty. Death too must be affirmed. Everything belongs, but some things must die. Everything is by necessity, yet freedom can prune the problems away. So much of the evil of the world are the cramps and birth pains of the motherverse, the Universe growing past he pains, and using pain to give birth to a higher good. All suffering, every travesty and horror, is affirmed as good in its place, and of some value. We fight like heroes against every injustice, and yet we would not desire a world were injustice was impossible. We affirm this world.

            The allistic style is not quite the classical, and is less harsh on romanticist passion as Nietzsche is. Passion too is good, and even decadence has its place, as Nietzsche said, his passing form sickness to health taught him all he knew, and by becoming decadent, he learned to overcome it. So long as a thing is, some necessity allowed it. What good will better satisfy that necessity. How can we accept and appreciate, how to receive and affirm all things, and yet move past them? By power, by creative interpretation, by bold courage, by ever striving and loving the game. This is allism. The style of allism is very much a Nietzschean style, is in the style of Emerson and Whitman, but with this distinction, -- perhaps it isn’t even a distinction! Allism affirms the necessity of decadents, of communists and socialists, of Christians and Buddhists, affirms it all as necessary for the All of Man, and yet knows that something more is needed to unify them all to one style. Allism is this unification. A million ideas, a single style: this is our promise.

 

 

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chiding the timid

 

You say we have a global crisis, I say we finally have a globe, something to celebrate: history is about to begin, the first millennium opening with that religious insult to mankind, only to close with global union and solidarity of the invincible human race, and this all wise minds will affirm, knowing that a strong head is a peerless weapon -- mind to mind my passion calls! Have you imagined our place is in a bad way? Have you bought the lie? Your newspapers are fiction from head to foot, and like every generation, you think the world will end. Here's a little known secret: the world never ends. Ecologically, economically, sociologically, we have faced much worse, and in the future will face worst still. But today is something to celebrate over. Life is a mirror: your own life is the microcosm of the earth. Never trust your values to another, nor boast, for the boaster lacks conviction: face the facts and realize you cannot bribe the reaper. You bought this life, and death's the price. I give to a man as he gives, I mirror others. For those in panic I give them panic, but to the certain I give joy. Give to time your practice, and practice in eternity, for eternity is a way of dancing time. So you have learned a little lesson that Debt Is Evil? It made this world nevertheless, a world more populated than ever before, the people more educated, more literate, with higher IQs than ever before, diseases vanquished, and for the man of mind, the joyful reality that we have now World Libraries -- this is a globe! – what joy! -- for the library is the diary of mankind's genius. Crack the nut and taste the meat: life's problems are merely ways to cut the boredom. So what if there is much more debt than all the money in the world? And so? So what if we can change global weather? -- a power to be celebrated! As my mother was wont to say to me as I grew up: you worry to much! I tell you that if every anxiety that twitched your gut came true, nevertheless man would survive, grow, improve, and evolve to deity, on time, never to be diminished. What a glorious time to be alive, and we the allists, what a glorious time for us to think! What thoughts we think, that were never before possible! Best to shine our creative joy and seek that guiding necessity which is the purpose of all we do. Once a man knows his necessity, all worries, all fear, all anxieties melt away -- they've served their purpose -- and life becomes much simpler and sublime. This is our place and we will master it.

 

one thing is needful: lifestyle

I’ve been taking a break from my next book, the writing life, to recharge my batteries, to balance myself with a lot of reading on my ereader – thank you Sherry! What a great gift, and this year you added a reading light for an early Christmas light, how perfect! –- and a lot of family activity with the kids. A man or woman’s center always seeks balance after its growth, and balance before its growth. I feel I am gaining a great balance. Here is a ROUGH DRAFT of an essay on style. Hope you like it----

 

Daniel Christopher June

 

 

 

One thing is needful: Lifestyle

 

 

            After I had been tricked into a grocery store “free-sample” of a 4 inch square of “miracle cloth,” the saleswoman went on to sell the small gathered crowd so that they were grasping to buy the expensive “German patented” miracle. I also bought one of these ridiculous mops, because I enjoyed the saleswoman’s performance. If you have style, you can sell rags to rich men, as she did. If you have style, you can wow an audience with a coin from the ear, while the master illusionist of flat affect merely wins grudging concessions to his prowess. Have style, and I will believe your lies, even though I know the truth. Style is everything. A man copying the Bible word for word is said to bleed style through his stylus, and even the Sunday Sermon, which is written with the quill of a parrot, can make the book of Revelation appear well-written, and the biblical inconsistencies to be pregnant with deep truths.

            The very centermost of a man, his needs, is a poem, and within that poem, a name, without equal or echo anywhere in the universe.

            Style is the art of transition, moving from one articulation to the next. The substance of a discourse, the facts, which are embedded in little logical gems of X=Y or X à Y, gives the connotations, the doubled and redoubled feeling of these identities and causalities. Its all about the sauce, but there must be a cracker beneath. What would the meal be without the meat? And what would the meat be without the sauce.

            Philosophy, science, and religion are the modalities of truth. Yet who really cares about the truth? Its beauty that matters. We love a philosopher even if we disagree with his conclusions, for he has exposed and manifested his spirit and soul, his breath and his blood. Culture is the abstraction of the instincts. What do nutritional needs finally have to do with fine dining? Hardly anything! Cheap and hearty foods would be wholesome. There is no need for wine.

            Yet poetry is wine, and there is no man alive who does not speak some mode of poetry, whether a master like Whitman or Dickenson, or at least the pop song on the radio, the Sunday sacrament, or his choice of garb. The spiritual shape I make is neither line nor circle, but the purpose of tropic directness, like the man who walks with purpose, for whom the crowds will part.

            Style is the way an individual balances. All of life is a compensation. Whether with Newton, we see that every action inspires an equal and opposite action; whether we observe ink as it equally saturates a beaker of water, or as we see the various races of people work out throughout all large cities, so that every large city is a microcosm, representing the entire globe – the examples of this are limitless, they are true of every branch of science, of psychology, or literature, of poetry – we find that everything balances, everything inspires its opposite, that if the sentimentals prate on the goodness of love (all the world needs now is love, love, love!) then the hero must take the side of villainy and hate, hate, hate.

            If a man exaggerates here, he must compensate there, and we all know it: the anti-homosexual preacher seeks out a male prostitute on the sly, the proper and sinless woman is cold and heartless, arrogance humbles itself, humility betrays itself, love her and you will hate what could take her from you, fear a thing and it will fascinate you. If you forbid yourself hate, than your love will fill in for this function, will poison those you claim to love. Stress in the world becomes anxiety in the heart, anxiety can feed work or it can feed guilt – the choice is yours – but if you take the easy way out, and feel guilt, then you will cling to your situation, make no bold change, and pay for your errors with a guilt. Guilt is the most common cure for anxiety, and yet even guilt often overwhelms the man, and he must take the next step, and transubstantiate even the guilt, this time into paranoia, that the badness is out there, waiting to accuse you, waiting, in its perverseness, to get you. The man who cheated on his taxes shivers when a policeman drives by. Does not the heart exact poetic justice in every direction?

            We feel guilty because we imagine we could have done otherwise. But for the man who honestly tries to do otherwise, he realizes he never had that power, and his guilt dissolves. The play of emotions is the style of a man, it makes his attitude, which forms his beliefs, which characterize his expressions, and finally his actions.

            My moods are myriad as a bubble’s skin. My heart is a wind which blows where it lists. What to do? Better the have a wide array of possibilities orbiting you, so that if you move to the left, your possessions to the left push you back towards center, and you you seek the right, your rightful possessions hold you in place. The heart is a terrible infant. You cannot predict him. But if you have not just your favorite author, not just one book, not just a favorite musician, but a varied list of favorites, you can always balance yourself out, and no extremes will goiter your day, you will not create any extended shadow-clowns to make at your excess. Choose a dozen great artists, and study their work, know their moods and styles, choose a dozen great authors. Choose a dozen wonderful friends, all different. Choose the friend who reinforces your greatness, chase away parasites and bleeders. Woman is lord of emotions – have intimate female friends. Man is tyrant of will – have respected men whom you look up to, and some who look up to you.

            To practice your style, learn metaphorical ways to lay it out, so you can practice aspects of it, for hours each day for decades, improving every aspect of your style, weakness covered in strength, for as Nietzsche’s greatest passage tells us: “One thing is needful: to give style to your life.” How? See your life as a game. A game simplifies the complexity of life into a progression of logic, so that we see plainly that every vice is also a medicine, every bad habit a remedy, that it is precisely inner doubt that makes the faithful cling, that the proper cure for depression, the best that always works, is electroshock therapy, both literally and figuratively, with the traumas we unconsciously invite into our homes, so that we can agree with Emerson that the soul is additive, and doesn’t balance anything, lest it be a balance of everything, like a white rose blossoming amidst a great black and receding night of the world, so that a man may properly recognize the universal necessity for his existence, and he can finally saw with honest certainty: I am the savoir of the world.

            Style is in the shape of your needs, and the articulations your carnal instincts provide to feed those needs, and the articulations your education gives to twist and invert those instincts, and the stylistic shape of beauty, from the naked will itself, which adorns its inner void of fullness with garbs of conversations and personalities. Admire your virtues and admire your vices: a transfer of names would put a virtue in the alley, or the beggar on a throne.

            Practice your virtues to the sweating point each day: don’t merely maintain; enhance. The supreme innermost of your needs and mind are protected by the habit of holding an independent space within your soul. Put God in your debt – do little acts of kindness, unrequested and unrequited, deeds done in the dark, and your reward will grow inside you, that you you know you are beautiful for your eyes only. Romance yourself. Don’t you know the seven hills of Rome were victorious over all the world because of a self-trust that was only symbolized and rhetorically absolved from criticism by religions terms of supernatural ideals. We must ever return to the pragmatic as counterblast to sentimentality, to preach Nietzsche to the romantics, we must never take emotion as truth, but as the fuel for seeking and confirming truths, so the mystic bows to the philosopher, the philosopher feeds the poet, and the poet inspires the hero, as Caesar wept from hearing the stories told of Alexander before him, whom he felt unable to match.. The rose of language in four days blooms. The hero, who invented the agriculture age, then the factory age, then the transportation age, and now the computer age, with the help of the philosopher, takes all he has from the four other forms and yet heroism is only beginning with work and invention. “when we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than sugar plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed and drawn out, and the result, or staple production, is not slave, nor operatives, but men – those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers.” When Thoreau listed those four types of man, he crowned his list with the redeemer, the man who embodies all four. What is done in secret is rewarded in secret, what is done before men is rewarded by men: both are good in their own way. If you do your kindness for praise, praise is your reward, useful and good, but less empowering than if you were overlooked. If you receive so much as one compliment, your self-estimate is compromised, and what you gain in prestige, you lose in pride.

            The fountainhead of style, the independent mind and its grounding in each his peerless needs, is well protected by the mirror womb of Satan and her flux of creativity, the delta of deliverance. We each speak our own idiolect, a certain set of terms which we use to put all other experience into standard notation. Your actions forge your words. Just as some ideas must be hammered into our heads, as if we had the wrong bump on our adamantium skull, and rude nature insisted to wield Ama’s hammer and pound that sucker flat, so our vocabulary is borne of all our experiences, and sometimes an entire lifetime is spent on defining one word, which today is yours, and tomorrow is the world’s.

            The creative balance absorbs the self-increasing energy of the independent soul, and differentiates our energy into a need for this a need for that, in accordance with our real needs and our secondary needs, being our wants and desires. The square void of independent purity is surrounded by the triangular flux of, a dynamo of chaos of order that meets its limits with the sphere of daily cycling, practicality, industriousness. This is the great balance of the soul, where style becomes properly style. What is unbearable once is bearable twice, by the same logic that if you want to rescue your offended friend, you must offend him three more times, or he will never forgive you. Violence washes many sins. Rhythm is in compression and release, beauty is the excitement of tensions, and in their aesthetic release, so that food balances food, salty grease calls for sugar, crackers beg for water, cookies wish for milk, and for the the bad meals life sometimes gives us: sauce is savior. Come, my fellow Allists, and be with me the sauce of the earth.

            Dear friend! Tell me true. This is my covenant with each of my friends: I will not coddle you, your mother can do that. I will speak the truth, direct to the heart. The style of intimacy is counter the style in the streets. Choose your friends carefully, make no compromise. The world is made for compromise, but your inner heart is your own. Make love to your solitude, know that the greatest friendships are respectful of distance. Now a kiss, tomorrow and after a long vacation. I sat upon my idea and let it tuck under, with the greater part of my mind to brood in empty depression, and here I struggle with life and am sour to my loves, till the muse whispers “It is time,” and in love the child is born. “He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public,” said a man who himself proved it. Thus I choose my careful friends. For in conversation, we are constantly laying down implicit (and explicit) rules, introjecting a set of expectations, threats, desires, possibilities, and impossibilities in others. For the friend that “knows you better than you know yourself,” you need not explain. It is known. I listen admirers and am never surprised. I listen to my friends and am confirmed and challenged. Who will be my lover? Who will be that friend who never tires of hearing of me? I have already chosen a few lovers from off my library shelf. Where is the living soul I can admire? Why are so many of you educated men aloof? The greatest insult is not dismissal, but a limited and qualified compliment. “I liked it, but” and then the arrows. So many of you critics are jealous of my power, of any power you see, you resenters and cursers of your betters. It takes a Frenchman to make the phallus, the creative cock of God, to be the symbol of castration.

            To develop style, study style. Never read for entertainment. Ever wear your professor’s spectacles, and keep the keen eye of criticism on the nuance of the page. All of life is a book. Read your studies as intently as you would the letter of a lover. Donkeys prefer straw to gold. Seek the best styles, the highest beauties. Choose the genius out of season, he at last is true and tall:

 

Dressed in summer

Bare in winter

The higher I reach

The lower I go!

 

            And I may bend in the storm, but I am never broken. I eat the earth with a fork of lightening. I take every book the holy spirit has inspired, world literature, nation for nation, prophet for prophet, science for science, philosophy for philosophy. Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau read world literature and foreign scripture to escape the English precedent, to escape being colonial they turned global. My aim to my wide and endless studies is to reduce all truths to the American style, to my own. My practice is my way.

            I must study always, hours a day, and at least one intense hour a day of style over matter. Some men do enough work to escape criticism – and not a scrap more; a wonderful frugality to pool their energy, to reserve their best to their best purpose. Yet take the time to do it right, though it take you all the day. Only what you have done are you certain you can do. If you would have the power do the deed. Never equate freedom to color outside the lines with the inability to color within them. That would be taking the cowardly weakling as a model of restraint. Practice deliberately, with exacting schemes to better each aspect of your art – this alone makes excellent, not just bare practice but deep practice, so that your long term memories hold the truth, and you need not think when muse-song calls. Intelligent art is failed art, this is the lesson of 20^th century art. If I could give you givingness, you would be better for your loss. If I could teach you how to teach yourself, I would be the best of teachers.

            How did the great stylists gain their traits? By deliberate, intense, deep practice to transfigure their own real potential, not in imitation, but in the self-maximizing of the soul. Would you be a writer? Study the biographies of Charles Ives and Beethoven. Charles had so many innovations in style, that an otherwise respected musicologist, Maynard Solomon, would try in vain to say that Ives had changed the dates on all his compositions till after the European musicians such as Schoenberg had invented them, though it is clear from Ive’s diaries and his own admission that he had never heard their music. Beethoven too constantly challenged himself, would exert a thousand tries to perfect one musical piece – necessary and annoying though it may be – though the perfect expression that bursts forth unannounced – the true savoir comes without announcement – and gives her grace from easy lilt.

            No mere practice, no rote, no operant conditioning could render your soul divine, nor transfigure your spirit. B.F. Skinner’s work demonstrated that operant condition of positive and negative feedback and can make an animal behave contrary to what you would expect, with respect to its instincts. After noting Pavlov’s success with dogs – surely the name rings a bell? – he made elaborate cages and traps later to called “Skinner boxes” – knowing that there is more than one way Skinner a cat – and thus proving that Skinner is such a weird best who could keep this behavior up with just a bit of praising and fine congratulations from the scientific community. So while you would not expect a grown man to torture animals with puzzle boxes, yet he was reinforced to include Jung and his own daughter into his silly games. For really, before Pavlov nobody knew to get a dog to roll over or play dead, the apparatus being unthinkable. But as for us, in our creative growth, no amount of feedback will suffice. We must be self-satisfying, self-congratulating, and end each day happy that we did so good, and angry we did not do better.

            Excess must balance excess, and greatness must balance greatness. No man becomes great who is not balancing a deep and invincible counter urge. For the sublime music and the perfect execution of art, you must look at the intimate wound of the artists heart. He creates from necessity. Either he is wounded by love, is overly happy so much that it hurts, and must express his joy in lightning strikes of ejaculatory beauty, or perhaps the opposite, he feels unimportant, overly sensitive, perhaps a bit peculiar in the world. He must be rich of spirit. God blesses the rich. The extra soul a man is born with makes him bold with battle and long in persistence. Wisdom kisses the lips of death: such an artist has faced absolute death. Creeds are the for credulous: why should I worship when I myself am God? I give you my writings. The supper supped, the guests depart. But my friends who helped prepare the meal stay to clean up, enjoy my fire, and then true brotherhood begins. I give myself: who can receive? The bad friend poisons the heart, so be slow to trust, but the one who honors your best, and whose best you respect and honor, he is worth more than the eyes in your head or the hands at your side. He does not flatter you or shower you with gifts. The small and timely gift is greater than a fortune. Sweeter words, sour heart; and wisdom wastes no words.

            Come my Ama, my Psyche, my Evalie: were you to die, the sun would cease to shine, or if compulsed to shine, that only from the ignobility of suicide.  Love always comes on time, but when she leaves, I am never ready. Your name rings like an epitaph: it is so certain and absolute. Never mind the evangels who promise me eternity, but grudge me five minutes. Your love and beauty is all the proof of our eternity I seek or need. The arrows of time are cocked in the bow of eternity, and yet heaven loves her own. I know you proud poets brag “sooner break my heart than break my hands,” and I believe you. Yet my dancer is pure Triptoes when I lack your eye on my sublime.

            What demon dare damn the light bringer, what ass-faced God dare touch the light bringer? And what scarecrow atop that ass would dare damn my lightbringer? Bringer of light, Luciana, Sophia Lux, Holy Spirit of my soul, your son the word is Hermes Logos, word of writing, pen of flight, verse like a hypnotic wand. I love my children of Allism.

            It was wisdom to say “all is one,” it was wisdom to say “all is many,” but the most casual and superficial of wisdoms. These aren’t even essays, they are not attempts, they are lays of the all, everpoems, I breath them to my lovers. I am the transfiguration of the holy spirit, the Pentecost of my youth blossomed adult. Religion is intuition, philosophy is grammar, science is sensation, and all are framed in the riverbed of history, looking up to the beautiful possibility of art: true Beauty is irresistible.

            What are these other books? So much shell, so little meat, so your books to me. For the choice cut, I’d chew through a pile of shells, but I will not praise you for the effort. If you are not Christ’s second coming, then is your faith in vain. But I the fullness, Mattria, universal everlife, do not ask for proofs and pardons. I see beauty for beauty and draw my own to my arms. The Allstyle is a lover’s style, we praise the best and seek the same. Nietzsche rightly said that one thing is needful, and we each make our life pure art. This alone redeems, this alone unifies the mystic, the philosopher, the poet, and the hero. Ololo, the fullness, this we take on and this we love. Vivoce.

 

 

 

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some notes on Emerson's essay "compensation"

I have decided to move my commentaries of Nietzsche, Rand, Emerson, and Zizek to another section, to be part of the five translations I made, a volume of translations and commentaries. Here is a recent one. You all know I am greatly moved by the ideas of Emerson. His essay “compensation” is a practical and powerful exercise in common sense. Near the end of the essay comes the problem of saying that the world balances itself out with the idea of the soul being just another balance in the world.

 

Notes on the Essay "Compensation" by Emerson

 

            After describing how it is the nature of the world and the universe to compensate, or balance itself out, so that there is no need for providence or divine judgment or end of the world justice, Emerson faces a few criticisms. First of all, if every good has its bad points, and every bad has its good points, why try? Why care? It all works out on its own. In other words, if I am not supposed to worry about the world, how can I care?

            There is an exception to the law of compensation:

"The soul is not a compensation, but a life. The soul is. Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being. Essence, or God, is not a relation, or a part, but a whole. Being is the vast affirmative, excluding negation, self-balanced, and swallowing up all relations, parts, and times within itself. Nature, truth, virtue, are the influx from thence."

            In a typical Emersonian circumlocution, the innermost is the most divine things, and the centermost is equivalent to the farthermost. The soul is, the world compensates, and evil? Whence evil? He takes the tract of Augustine, who solved the problem of evil by denying that evil exists:

Vice is the absence or departure of the same. Nothing, Falsehood, may indeed stand as the great Night or shade on which as a background the living universe paints itself forth, but no fact is begotten by it; it cannot work, for it is not. It cannot work any good; it cannot work any harm. It is harm inasmuch as it is worse not to be than to be.

            So the metaphysics is now threefold: the world, the night, and the soul. And the soul creates everything, but once created, things develop the natural laws, summed up in compensation, which is also described in every branch of science, as well as in the moral world of human relations. It is a physical, a biologically, a psychological, a moral, a literary fact of all created things: they balance. It seems that the initial imbalance is the addition into the world, in a universe ever expanding, where a fresh singularity is born out of the soul at every act of originality, for as Heraclitus had said, who also envisioned a world of flux and order: "The soul is a self-increasing logos." And as Emerson said:

"There is no penalty to virtue; no penalty to wisdom; they are proper additions of being. In a virtuous action, I properly am; in a virtuous act, I add to the world.... The soul refuses limits, and always affirms an Optimism, never a Pessimism."

"There is no tax on the good of virtue; for that is the incoming of God himself, or absolute existence, without any comparative."

            And then Emerson takes the recursive tract: if everything in the world compensates, and if the soul adds, what about the knowledge of compensation? Where do the two meet? What is the bridge?:

"But there is no tax on the knowledge that compensation exists, and that it is not desirable to dig up treasure [unearned]."

            And so is answered the conundrum: if the soul adds, and the world compensates, and if the soul knows that the world compensates, we must therefore say that compensation becomes pure addition when it is known.

            And yet, this supernatural soul, which does not abide by the rules of the world, somehow balances it:

"On the nature of the soul is the compensation for the inequalities of [personal] condition [or circumstance]."

            There follows a strange privilege of love as ownership, so that if you are poor, your love will "maketh his own the grandeur he loves," again, presenting the aesthetic sense of owning without taking. As usual, Jesus and Shakespeare are summed to represent religion and literature:

"Jesus and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His virtue, -- is not that mine? his wit,--if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit."

            Or to balance the equation, any virtue Jesus has that I don't doesn't count as virtue.

            Emerson goes on to a system of personal growth that greatly foreshadows the central insights of Carl Rogers on the nature of the healthy soul. Mental illness is a sort of writer's block, or as Reich would characterize it, a block of flow in the muscles of our body; but in Roger's the problem is the same as with Emerson, the crux where soul and body intersect.

"Every soul is by this intrinsic necessity quitting its whole system of things, its friends and home and laws and faith, as the shell-fish crawls out of its beautiful but stony case, because it no longer admits of its growth, and slowly forms a new house. In proportion to the vigor of the individual these revolutions are frequent, until in some happier mind they are incessant and all worldly relations hang very loosely about him, becoming as it were a transparent fluid membrane through which the living form is seen, and not, as in most men, an indurated heterogeneous fabric of many dates and of no settled character, in which the man is imprisoned."

            And so the same paradox of his concluding section comes up again. How can the compensating world relate to the additive soul? Here it is seen that a soul that increases outgrows its environment. As the soul grows, the world must be replaced by a bigger world. Friends must be left behind, jobs and stations, discarded.

            Even shocks and traumas are without consequence.

A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.

            The soul, it seems, can never be wounded by the world, but even the greatest traumas, when the push something into the soul, get it back out with increased interest and surcharge.

            The two laws, the laws of the soul and the laws of the world, yet interpenatrate each other, and also remain pure.

 

 

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