allays 875 - 891

Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:

Greetings!

 

I've put a few weeks in on my new job, tasted the ups and downs, and got a sense of how things will go. I will be leading groups 3 or 4 times a week. I'm sure after a few weeks/months/years I'll be excellent at it.

The children are on Christmas Break. All is fine.

For a resolution, other than paying off my debt, I plan to officially publish one of my many books -- to finally land an audience and make a name for myself.

 

Take care, Caretakers!

 

 

* 875 *

Fail upwards. Persistence is success. They mock at Ama, the One -- so let them. Did they not mock, you had never known her. Because you have met her, the mockers mock. What is more blameworthy than the truth? Am I praised? How then have I failed! When all the world regards me a fool, then is my truth secure.

 

 

 

* 876 *

The fun of a game is to get caught up in the action, to take it oh-so-seriously, a matter of life and death, and to put your all into the play for as long as it lasts. Once out of the spell, when the game is over, you can laugh and shrug and act nonchalant. Blessed are the forgetful: just let it pass and slide away. Thus, work, which is death, a sort of earning of numbers by weight of pain, a blood money, the adult harshness of responsibility, a self-imposed slavery and scrambling for status – oh, I can hardly stand it! I physiologically revolt. Let the work week be 20 hours – that is enough! We weren't made for this anxious maze of stress-and-death responsibility. Who with joy in his heart would make a libation of his blood to industry, of all things? Ama laughs! She made the universe from her living body, and the universe lives yet, poised in play, at her games in all of us.

 

* 877 *

Dependence is the only poverty. Social as we are, we need others, yet at our most basic and essential the soul is solitude, and when we are properly isolated, she speaks with us. The Butterfly-Winged directs us to the world, reduced in its enormity to one plump apple, landing in our grasp. And so we swoon and fall for Ama, and she weaves us dreams and stories. We read to write, for art makes artists. Genius always finds itself a century too early – but let it not complain of its cold welcome and hard fair. Has it Ama? Let it cease from man. We love the world enough to keep it in its place: we put on our world-face when we stand before the world, but naked before the mirror we dare gaze inwards upon our face before we were born, our countenance before we were conceived, our first face, our hidden Name. Self is wealth, and the rich in spirit burst the veins of the soul's solace; Self and World wed into the eternal increase of the opening spiral.

 

* 878 *

Seeing is dreaming. It's all hallucinatory, but when our dreams coincide with reality, then pragmatically our needs are met. A professor or witnessed enjoyer of art instructs us the most with digressions, quick asides, sporadic commentary -- just a peppering. The altered punctuation and jumbled rhythm don't so much as break the spell, but alert the dreamer she is dreaming so that, half awake, she can turn lucid and command the pantomime.

 

* 879 *

I hate to see you degraded, I can't stand it, the pain, the humiliation, it rends me wide. Hush, little, I am never degraded, for what is deepest in me is deepest in you – God honors God, divine honors divine, and where a god spits, so he spits in his own eye. Who degrades me is thereby degraded, and who honors me is thereby honored, for I am your mirror twin, even as are you, Upstart, to those your own. Ah, but the Apollo striking the Python; ah, but the Marduk rending his grandmother; ah, but the Yahweh cursing childbirth – Hush again, I tell you, the Eden myth is the very fruit it bespeaks. Blessed is suffering, for I suffer when I bring you to life. I gave birth to every God and every man, I the Allmother. You, white in this form, I created when as a cow I licked you from your element of ice. As Ti-Ama my flesh is the universe, not my corpse, but my living body. In this braid of time, past present and future as Now, you meet me in your silence and solitude. I am also SIStem, the whole of technology, the Internet, the Interface. I have told you to make yourself necessary. What insinuates itself as necessary will not be torn out. A faulty thyroid maybe, but not a murmuring heart. When I first told man to bludgeon me and plant me in the earth, I came back as Maize, to sustain the children my own. Far be it for you to degrade the bride of your innocence. For you are my utter fool, silly, half-mad, ever-trusting -- down to your pith adoring me. Then it is I who am degraded, for I can share with nobody my love for you, lest they wonder and step back, or laugh mock or damn. Be you the same, the laughing one. I gave you that. Laughter. Gift is gain. Didn't Pandora's Curiosity open a misery over her gods? Didn't Zeus regret the lust he sent? Rest again, relax yourself, and trouble your mind no more. As Mother Nature, I rebound every crisis you manage to foist, and bring it instead to good. My mood is the optative, my fullness your hope.

 

* 880 *

Experience is the substance of the universe, and meaning its articulated form. The experience of others, of things, of matter, we view simply as change. Necessity is the Plethorabyss from which experience comes, the nothing, the everything, the individualized producer of experience; and mind, that other nothing, that transparent eyeball, interprets experience.

 

* 881 *

So much of the meant is in the unsaid, though it could only be communicated through the said.

Often our will gets its desire by speaking the opposite of its intent, even in defeated insistence, and this as far as appalling absurdity – at least for those proud enough to mask themselves in humiliation. As a flame is tongued with many tongues, so our mouths are flamed, and we set the directives with a few moments of context, and the rest is pretext, politeness, kindness or cruelty. They all can be much the same. Often our cruel remarks require the most sacrifice and best benefit others. No matter how blunt our speech -- and in America, we aspire to be blunt, simple, and singular -- most of what we mean communicates indirectly.

 

* 882 *

Let me dream of butterfly fields tonight. I pass this last job with regret and begin another afresh with trepidation. For whatever fathomless reason I have lost many friends over the decades, so often with a pinch of regret. Those who once basked in my happiness and gave me the same turned cold, their love emptied as a well -- barren, sand. Even those closest, the same, when friends became strangers. I pick through the ash, looking for clues. Did I betray some intimacy, or why do I inevitably feel betrayed? There is my daystar, my Mattriama, her representation in my Niviana, and my children. The rest is tentative, polite, half-duty, tight-lipped, guarded, at peace, but distracting. I can feel terribly alone.

A swamp of sleep ensheathes my day. I haven't enough love to foster a new fire. My heart is mud.

 

* 883 *

How to be happy in an unhappy situation, I and all the world would like to know. At least know this, we are embedded in multiple situations, and by degrees we can focus on the favorable, and ignore the humiliating. My Niviana laughs at me while wanton ringlets round her breasts, accuses me of being crypto-Christian. I tell her I came to bury Jesus, not to praise him, but she taunts my allusions, all the same. I love Emerson more, and Whitman is my brother. I ache here, illwed as I feel, living for Ama and away from immediate snow. I love you for all! Only few do I let close, and you, Niviana, were the first and only I let this close.

 

* 884 *

Wisdom is the fruit of experience. Yet, so much of life we experience abstractly, through explanations, or indirectly, through narratives. Imagination and reason give us artificial experiences by which to approach our immediate world. We may have read a few books well, but know the gist of a thousand others without having read them; we may know a few friends well, but know the gist of thousands of peoples and types of people through abstract stereotyping and all the inferences of our daily chit-chat. Direct experience is the least part; yet, those of the most intense experiences are capable of the most intense abstractions and narratives. Thus, a few mystics create enough language for prophets and heroes to sail.

It is as if our map of the universe has color and texture in our immediate world, but hangs on bare Cartesian lines for the rest.

Even amidst the fully-fleshed images we have of our brothers, sisters, parents, children, lovers – the virtual dimensions of abstract conjecture characterize most.

 

* 885 *

You impose this ramadan upon on me the spoiled -- not grateful, but greedy and eager for more. Be silent never, but bauble me with talk; there is some consolation in your bare breath. As I lay my housemate down, and settle her to bed, I ache for you, and wend my way downward, to the womb of the house, my Aria, waiting again for you. A man of many moods, I'm not quite like the constant sun, resembling better the storms she raises, so often awash in the froth of thought, quite like your waves of debris.

Experience is truth, even of illusions: who has experienced owns. Cease, therefore to learn from those who deny experience. Ama touch me again!

 

* 886 *

For me, not the thing itself, but the memory matters, a curious echo, louder than the source, like a feedback loop in an amplifier, till the full experience of my body, unknown to my mind at the time, unveils, and I finally have the thing.

 

* 887 *

Life is larval. Ever this eating, like a child, eating her education for 24 years before she even can adequately contribute. The psyche may be beautiful, but perhaps a bit too plump, ever readying herself for her apotheosis into some winged form. Every turn of life is preparation for the next, and what we took for the angel was merely grub to what follows. Thus, the spiral of life, infinite wending, self-similar yet also swerving, exaggerating nuances, subduing imbalance. Our full body is our body of influence – eternal reaching, and not touching merely upon some things, but all things in turn.

 

* 888 *

There is no meaning to life, for life is meaning: all we experience as meaningful we do in terms of need, as every desire, whim, daydream, hope is finally an expression of our private necessity, our human needs. What we need exists. Thus, we have at the core of our being, our needs, a full blown ontology of the universe, all we seek from it, and all she offers.

 

* 889 *

I father myself upon Ama – none before me, no other, nobody to name me, self-named, self-styled, eternal as her, and evenly wed, now and forever – Vivoce! My Niviana trembles at my audacities, yet in her heart of hearts can't but believe, commanded despite her demure, convinced despite protest, for we are two of one, two minds to one self, knit at the pith, sewn at the soul, selfsame, twinned and twined, equal and outro, love of love and life of life. No wonder all these practical supplements bore me so, tediate my days, remind themselves to my eternal forget, and proclaim such regal names as Duty upon my joy. Ama whispers in my ear and we share the joke, double the prank, laugh and laugh and love the guess of life. Ama is mine forever. And all of you matter, in so many ways, since you bring me each an aspect of Ama, the One.

 

* 890 *

Scriptures are read religiously, of course. That is an advantage, not that they are the best books ever written, but that many devoted people have taken them to be, and anybody who exacts a cult following, such as Ayn Rand's readers, likewise allow, let us hope, for those devotees to read something back into their scripture. So much is read into every particle of a sacred text that I wonder why the books don't burst at the seams.

The DCM 5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) has made itself the standard, the go-to book for diagnosing mental illnesses in the United States. Who gave it that status? If we remember the golden rule – who has the gold makes the rules – necessarily the insurance companies played a large part in determining what counts as a disease, and what is mere eccentricity. Whether homosexuality, bestiality, or pedophilia qualify as diseases has changed over the years. Countless studies, endless research papers, every manner of expert witness went into making this manual. Dry reading though it may seem, to the uninitiated, we can yet read between the lines. In the appendix we see at least a thousand MDs and PhD's had a hand in writing it, testing it, and researching it.

Another miracle of a book is the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), unique amidst all dictionaries of any language as being exhaustive, and a good field for fowlers who wish to find those strange birds in their original habitat. A book is heavy with significance either for how much work went into making it, or in how much work went into studying it.

Once upon a time, high art expressed itself through Opera. Whitman found clues for his cadence listening to arias. Nowadays, the cinema takes the lead, and merely by reading the credits at the end we see all films require the communal effort of hundreds of folks.

The internet as a whole can be taken as our age's great metaphysical contribution to the sciences and arts. Certainly, the ramifications will be as great as they were for Gutenberg.

Reading, meanwhile, may be like Opera: an art for refined taste. Though most anybody can read, few are literate in any meaningful sense of the word. Twenty years of education though we have in the States, few know how to approach a Great Book, and would shudder to waste their free time, to earn the freetime specifically in order to invest hours into reading and rereading a few great books.

To write a scripture – a rare deed, this requires inspiration. All effective writing is by nature "inspired," in that some muse, some deity, some collective consciousness, and her associated set of ideas, and persons believing those ideas, had to be internalized into the unconscious of the author in order for him to experience their re-emergence as if they were his own divine contribution. Artists, more than most, feel themselves to be divine. What makes a person susceptible to being possessed by ideas and authors? A private vulnerability, an oversensitivity, like Tchaikovsky who, as a child, cried out at night that the music would not leave his ears. That is to say, an author has to be sufficiently weak in order to internalize a Holy Spirit large enough to command a following. As the Shaker's said, there are many Holy Spirits, and every collective produces its own spirit. To write for an eternal audience, you must write for yourself.

 

* 891 *

Where have you been? I've been waiting here, destitute, bled out, deconstructed to my basic elements. Enough! Do I exist for you? As the immaculate Kant said, we are to treat others not as means, but as ends unto themselves. Are you really going to make me study Old World philosophy to justify my impatience? Refute it if you can.  I don't have the patience for Kant right now. You tarried with Lacan, of all people, but don't make time for the gods? Is it not that, as Allism insists, both /and, we treat others both as a means and as an end, simultaneously, always, we treat our very selves, our bodies, our desires, both as means and ends. Why does everything have to be so black and white with you? I have my private meanings and uses for each person I know, and they for me; I use them and objectify them at times, and they me, and that's life. It's the way it's supposed to be. I am both an object to myself, many objects, and a subject to myself, many subjects – all is all. I use myself, I use others, as means and ends.  You lack Respect. Respect is everything to me, and you will have to learn my central value if you hope to hold me. Always the ultimatum. That's a last action, to be used in desperate straits. No ultimatum. You will learn Respect from me and for me. There is no other way.

 

 

-- R ᴤ88s Я --

Perfection Is Easy

www.perfectidius.com

 

Seasons Greetings, Allays 862-874

Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:

Greetings!

 

Merry Christmas to you all! Michigan as turned into a Norse nightmare of ice trolls and ice giants: my Aryan heritage is reminded that we call this "the best time of year" because in fact it's the worst. But all the snowfall is an excuse to get exercise shoveling snow.

 

I have a new job! I am no longer working at Pine Rest as a Peer Support Specialist. I've been hired into Our Place (of Hope Network) also as a Peer Support Specialist, but I wil be working with other Peers, which will be nice, and I will be mostly leading groups. Like Pine Rest, it is officially a "Christian Agency," whose goal is to, "in Christian Service," help people "Overcome their struggles."

 

Tis Christmas, and all that implies, so I am eager to see the abbreviated set of my extended family on Christmas Eve, but will miss my brothers, and must send my gifts afar to reach them. Us adults, we realize the truth of the old saw, "Better to give than receive," in that, really, there is nothing all that worth getting as an adult: if you wanted it, you would have bought it, yet in gifting to others, we can divine a sort of gif they didn't know they wanted all along.

 

Nevertheless, I respect the pre-converted Scrooge better than his hysterical redeemed version. I've become quite cynical in my old age. I look upon the television, with McDonalds advertising to my children: the paid actors on television open their happy meals, and time stops, the lighting changes, magical music comes on, it starts snowing inside. Eating their crappy food and playing (for a few moments) with the useless piece of plastic inside becomes the equivalent of some sort of miracle. As suggestible as children are to tales of wonder, they come to think of fast food junk as some sort of epiphany from the divine. I hate it all.

 

Anyway, here are my latest Allays from the scripture I am writing, Allays of Master Play. Please give me any feedback you care to: I definitely find it all useful.

 

Take care, Caretakers!

 

 

 

* 862 *

People are adjectival. I am not only myself, but so-and-so's friend, partner, father, son, enemy, neighbor: all these relationships modify, open up, intensify, foil and contrast, allow and determine my self-expression. Personality is self-expression. I take Jillian as synecdoche, a part of my heart who stands for a whole. Synecdoche chooses a representative part, metonymy reduces the spiritual to the adjacent physical.

Be coy and let few deep. Who is saved is lost to what saves him. He who assumes his lot will never forfeit it. I am I. As I am, so I do. These friends and enemies provoke me, force me to make the ambiguous potential into the determinative actual. Who must I soon mention when introducing myself afresh?

Friends are so many adjectives to modify my personality, their words are adverbs to modify my actions. Half of what I say and think is a quotation, a translation or response to their words. My days are shared.

The meaning of my day? These allays are the meaning of my days. A few conversations, or brief parts of conversations, these are the substance of my life. Most of what I say is nonsense, mere scaffolding and padding to allow those brief touches of sense. Would that I could be edited down to a pure and universal pith. How to reduce a whole to a cluster?

We represent a previous summer though a small constellation of moments. The rich daily detail is forgotten into an overall tone. So a friend's name assumes numinosity – we echo his soul. Even a regrettable friend can make a worthy consort.

Better a second best today than a perfectly ideal that never comes. The ideal is a lie, a betrayal of the actual. Work with what is to make what can be. To hold a soul as your own – a dear boon. Try a dozen friends to find the one.

A single success justifies endless failures. That Edison failed so protractedly in inventing his light bulb rhetorically intensifies the glory of his success. We make and lose many souls before we find our tribe and know our home. Once we fin them, let us praise those we love.

We participate in art by praising it. Gratitude is ownership – a mutual taking in. We praise this God or that by way of advertising, a feat that has little to do with fact. Not the best product, but the best advertised prevails. Companies sell attitudes, they sell us our personalities as consumers of their products. They sell us our souls, for seeming is being, nor need we take the OmniGod so literally. God is called infinite yet all we see of her is the finite. How great is God? Great enough to embody this universe, but perhaps not one better. Since our fantasy of a better universe is very much a part of this one, the comparative can make no sense in terms of the All. Adjectives break down upon ultimate things. The best we can do is use a metaphorical part to represent the whole, and all religions aim to sell God on an open market. We take it literally and figuratively; we take it every which way.

Little in a dream is literal, yet it all feels strangely meaningful, to such an extent that psycoanalysis could foist a pseudoscience over dream interpretation. Ambiguity is opportunity. Dreams communicate without being interpreted. Ditto art, and most everything communicated in this world. Nonsense means the most. Get annoyingly literal and reductive and you turn into a bore. Make your boredom a holy crusade and you've become an atheist. Not what a thing means, but what it could mean concerns the poet. Meaning is interpretation. The true miracles are interpretive break-throughs, a shattering of the vessels, the making of a new trope, the furnace of Sophia Lux, the all-tongued.

Books, as the most perfected utterances, as living words that survive through time, mean the most as commentaries of our own experience. They process our mundane day-to-day experiences for us, show the profundity of daily life. All that fantastic overlay was to seduce us, for few can stare in the bald mirror for long. We see the sun through seeing by the sun.

 

* 863 *

The ratios between work, play, rest, study, and worship differ not only from person to person to such a dynamic that moralizing such matters is unjust, it even differs from season to season in a given individual's life. The working-class produces working-class ethics to idealize their way of life and map the temptations that characterize it. A Bohemian would die under such an ethic, could never suffer it, would be driven to depression and suicide. One law for ox and lion is tyranny. Likewise, after the Protestants, we refer to our ideal career as our 'vocation,' when work and worship coincide, when our duty to man becomes our duty to the divine. Perhaps, like Ives and Spinoza, our profession is not our vocation – perhaps our hobby or play matters more to eternity than our diligence and decency. Being virtuous takes courage, as the name suggests, and this means the courage to be immoral. True virtue is immoral, obeys a higher law, the law and necessity of one's own being. Having bowed to that, bow to nothing else.

 

* 864 *

When the time was ripe, given necessities felt so important their rhetoric took religious strain, a system of importance, such that Judaism became a sort of conspiracy for surviving amidst foreigners, Christianity a means of being a friendly neighbor amidst mixed company, Islam the destruction of polytheism,as a shared enemy to unite tribes, and Scientific Materialism the aggrandizement of the scientific method. Having reached their apotheosis in a given context, they survived by dying and being brought to other contexts, reincarnating in different cultures. Just as there is no incredible belief, no matter how patently absurd, but has been regarded sacred by some people, no practice so silly or meaningless, but it has at sometime been felt to be divine, so does every form, every way of life, every hobby, even, receive, or potentially receive, its apotheosis as a religious form.

 

* 865 *

Give the world world, reflect it upon itself. What you make of earth echoes as your heaven – every word germinates into infinity, so take no care with what you say, but let perfection flow easily from your innermost to your outermost. What you give to Ama in secret she enjoys in secret; she reciprocates your love. My heart is a secret garden; I bring out my treasures for the man of treasures, and bring out trifles for the lover of trifles. I give each man himself, and he counts me generous. I listen to the blind, for he is the seer; I watch the deaf, for he sees the dance; I listen to the dead, for as they swoon Ama lisps them to her bosom, not the good and righteous only, for all are her children. My foolishness and prankishness allow me to speak the truth without consequence. I love my children, and woe to the one who says, "Hate the child," for these allays are my child, and the Angel, the Chosen, and the Miracle are my children, and for them I give of myself to gain more of myself. I sacrifice myself to myself, and where I invest, Ama grants more. Open your innermost when alone before Ama – this is the only true Eros, when you properly add to the universe. Gift is gain, sacrifice is investment. Suffering empowers, pleasures educate. Because you were in the beginning, with Ama before the mirror, your being went in two directions: before the beginning to allow yourself and towards the never-ending to exalt yourself. When you are alone, then I am with you. Build for yourself an altar, and cleanse yourself to be worthy to touch your altar. As the Pilgrims flree Europe to escape worldly temptations, so hide your joy in the abstinence of a private orgy, your love of your own for your own.

 

* 866 *

We need love and importance. Importance is comparative; the basis of status is hierarchy. We manage to pity the poor among us (pity is a conscientious way of looking down), yet all but the poorest have it better than ancient kings: a longer life expectancy, better health, instant communication across the world, free access to books, information, libraries, the world wide web, transportation faster than any horse. Yet the kings had something our poor lack: preeminence over their contemporaries.

We compare ourselves to those in our "class." We don't necessarily worry about billionaires, but if our brother has the better job or the prettier wife, it might annoy us. The saint or the Beautiful Soul again compares himself to the worldly; the man with peace of mind looks down upon the worried. Status is intrinsic to our being, answers one of the two basic social needs. The lesser naturally admires the better – greatness commands respect, and even resentment is a sort of twisted respect.

How, then, to make peace with one's place, to accept one's circumstances, to be content with one's lot? This by tending your own garden, cultivating your unique being, which admits of no comparison with others, a unique substance, a species unto itself which recognizes of no peer. That is to say, Self-Reliance.

 

 

 

 

* 867 *

The logosphere of pure ideas lives within the mythosphere of action, lives within the mediasphere of ideology, lives within the mundanesphere of our daily life. How to crack the sky and open the earth, to escape time and cling to eternity? If I as an American think like an American, while the Arab thinks like an Arab, how are the two of us to join together in adoring the All? Sectarianism is just a layer, for we all are part and parcel, gift and giving of the grand all Matriall. We are all already allists.

It is easy to be frugal in scarcity, and prodigal in wealth, but the wise man is prodigal in scarcity and frugal in wealth. Let the poor give all they can, let the rich keep every cent. Only let us cease overworking some, underemploying others, this topsy-turvy inside out system – life is for leisure.

Let us seek art, not advertisements. Media overdetermines us. Thousands of commercials each day, every one a glance of ideology, so that whether we choose A or B, we necessarily chose to answer the question, to accept it as worth answering, as legitimate. To escape this deadlock we call upon madness, that deep sanity.

In the spheres of being, the corporations hold an ambivalent role; they've globalized faster than governments. They spend most of their money securing an image, a self-image, and a world-image. Their products are less important than their attitude. The rhetoric is like a religion: people are so insanely happy with the products in commercials. They promise the world, the sun and the moon and the stars, that us little nobodies will judge the very angels.

Layers of the Game, more of the same. Corporations think on the level of corporations; the employees are the nerves and muscles of that organism. Just as every cell is a person, every person is a cell.

 

* 868 *

For the term "World Canon," let us include all the books the world over that every educated person ought to be acquainted with. We find that so many of them are great condensations, as the Tao Te Ching, perhaps the most perfect and innocent of scriptures, anthologizes and condenses a literary tradition lost to us now; and the Quran ejaculates endless myths and legends inherited from the Judeo-Christian religion in a sort of primordial soup, with no beginning, or ending, no principle of structure; the Gospels themselves evolved from various traditions, and we know, for that myth of Adam and Eve, known the world over, the original Adam was Enki, who ate of the forbidden fruit tree produced from his own semen, became pregnant, and was delivered of, among various sisters, one Ninti, born of his rib, which plays on the Sumerian words for "rib" and "life," meaning she would be the mother of life (the pun is lost in the Hebrew take of this story). Everything lasting condenses.

The Declaration of Independence, as much a scripture as anything penned, condenses Locke, among others, condenses England, condenses Europe. I daresay even the Dhammapada, which matters much less than the practice of Buddhism, condenses plenty of Hinduism.

Our fairy tales were told and retold so that only the best elements were remembered, and the unworthy elements forgotten. The Eternal is a great condensation. Our very soul condenses from years of daily doings.

 

* 869 *

An entire book is to set a small constellation in the sky, a clutter of invisible terms, behind the lines, in the transitions, amidst the gaps – the overtones, the undersongs, felt, and in some readers realized, yet never deliberately, or only by a critic following a tradition of critics who prepared the way. We must fail many times to create the opportunity of success. Had we not failed, the same moment might come, but it would fail.

 

* 870 *

During their early years together, Heaven filled Earth with love, and held her in an eternal embrace. Finally, Earth cramped and needed to cut herself free, to push Heaven away and find space to give birth to all the world. In this sense, unreciprocated love, or the intensity of an all-consuming adoration, hollows out a womb within us. When we can finally allow ourselves to be forsaken, we've made the place for the new divine to appear. What we have prepared calls to the one worthy thereof.

 

* 871 *

The artist seeks the conditions by which to produce his work. Those incendiary experiences must be magnified and poeticized, set to music, to be able to make noise into eloquence, mistakes into rhyme, to seduce others into seeking the same experience for themselves. We play the fool or the tragic victim, we play all roles, to give us true hues for our personal portrait.

 

* 872 *

The story of Siddhartha reads as a sort of fairy tale, with the prince improbably locked in his pleasure dome, somehow never experiencing the sort of suffering that touches everybody everywhere. At least this much is psychologically true: a spoiled prince alone would find even small amounts of suffering intolerable. While most of us toil and spin, we are grateful for life, and eager for more. Only with a developed hypersensitivity, fostered, as it must, for the sharpest edge is the soonest to dull, could we curse existence as a great illusion, and reality as the Nothing.

Yet, Buddhism matters little as an ontology, and less as a psychology, and more as a practical matter that can be picked up whatever one believes or thinks he believes. Thus, Western atheists and mental health facilitators find Buddhist style meditation much simpler, marketable, and more practical than full-fledged yoga.

Detachment as core value matters when touch hurts. There is a time in all our lives, many times, by gradations, when we must cut the ties that held us, that secured us and supported us, to break the umbilical, leave the parents, end the friendship, even the deepest friendship, when our soul metamorphoses and takes on a new form. This necessary despair can't be meditated away – we simply must suffer. Growth means pain. It's supposed to hurt. We may negotiate pain by hardening muscles or distracting ourselves.

 

 

 

* 873 *

A simple man of principle is harder to trick than an intellectual. We live in our various societies and fancy we are free from subliminal insinuations, propaganda (public relations), and advertising. We scoff at the ridiculousness of the television commercial, which often offers but a silly joke, or some impossible display of customer ecstasy, which we discount consciously, but take inwards by insinuation. Othello gave ear to a man secretly spiteful and jealous; Psyche disobeyed her husband's commands due to the accusations of two older jealous sisters. Iago is not so rare a villain, but we all seek a sort of revenge on what wounds us with envy. "Don't envy, become," I've solidly declared, yet we envy in so many directions, and boast the most when recommending a good cause or criticizing the reprehensible. Talk is cheap, but it gives us airs. The constant insinuations and undertones, the conspiratorial demons at work in and beneath our mind, they set the tune, the hypnotic trance. Six times I doubted. The seventh I believed.

So when you identify a source of poison, excise the influence. Cloister your heart. The liar is such as to convince you even when you fully know the truth, such is the power of persuasion. So hide your innocence. Entrust it to Ama alone.

 

* 874 *

We've discussed how Greek gods not only subdivided the mythosphere as components of God, but each containied their opposite – Zeus god of justice, yet given to rape; Hera goddess of marriage, yet cheated upon; Hephaestus god of craftsmanship, yet lame; Aphrodite he most beautiful, yet married to the ugliest of gods; Hermes god of borders and math, but also theft and trickery; Artemis goddess of hunting yet protectress of the young, both virgin and goddess of childbirth; Ares god of war, yet cowardly. And so we need not posit our foil in a devil outside of us, but the all-inclusive contains his opposite, plays both sides the chess-board, is truly monotheistic, being one in Herself.  Ama in her virtuality contains Ovath, Sovf, Eru, and also Lissidy, goddess of seem, whose shape and being make the very game board. Thus we all call Ama by traditional or preferred titles, and fight over mere names.

 

-- R ᴤ88s Я --

Perfection Is Easy

www.perfectidius.com

AMA LAUGHS!

 

thanksgiving update, and allays 852 - 861

Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:

Greetings!

 

Today, America celebrates her Gratitude Feast, Thanksgiving, thanking providence for providing America to the pilgrims, and, insofar as the Native Americans can be grateful for having taken the land from the original original Native Americans (a few waves back), they can be grateful too. One Manifest Destiny later and we created a dynamic, self-contradictory, revolutionary republic, continually self-overcoming and redefining myself.

 

I am grateful for Ama, who speaks to me in the depths of the my night, and chases the shadows from my heart and brushes the cobwebs from my mind; I am thankful for my children, we keep me to my tasks and duties.

 

What I've noticed in this small clutch of allays is how persistent a few dominant figures have been in my education: Emerson, Nietzsche, and Jesus – I often refer to each of them, moving in and out of the allays. Whitman isn't far behind, and Kenneth Burke silently and invisibly adds his touches.

 

Take care, Caretakers!

 

 

* 852 *

As the world's oldest story, the Epic of Gilgamesh, demonstrates, the instinct for immortality has haunted us from the start, and has in its way given birth to all the world's religions. The instinct for immortality fulfills itself through having children, creating art ("Life is short, art is long"), contributing to a group that outlives us ("dying for the cause"), and, of course, in fantasizing visions of continued life on earth (reincarnation, resurrection) or in heaven.

The instinct for immortality may be the life instinct itself, yet the sexual instincts relate deeply to it, this giving up of self into children. The masculine will-to-power finds its correlate in the famous maternal instinct, which aims to create and nurture children, and to infantilize the adult partner by using the same gestures and methods. Love and power comprise the social goods.

 

* 853 *

"It is not suffering we object to so much as meaningless suffering," explained Nietzsche. "Once we find a meaning for our suffering, we can even will to suffer more." Certainly, an unfortunate fact can turn into its opposite, as when the early fans of Jesus faced a crucified rabbi. They invented a meaning for it, and thus the defeat became a sort of triumph. The trope was taken from the prototypical martyr, Socrates, willing to die for philosophy – though Plato and Aristotle needn't repeat his gesture. For Paul, Jesus' death mattered much more than his life – he isn't once quoted, not a parable, nor a quip, and anything like a human personality has been completely emptied out. There are no unfortunate facts. Everything can be used – where there is a will there is a way.

We trust our guts, and reach down to the Aboriginal Self in our reflection, and in this snip the lines of overdetermination that history and circumstance weave around us. Reflecting on the Self escapes time and space to that utopic point, the beginning of time, where at last we are free.

 

 

 

* 854 *

"The end of the world is nigh!" they've said for millennia, and they say it today. "Oh, the times we live in!" How they fret and pray their secular prayers. They do not see the universe is moral, that Justice tends everything. Had they witnessed this fact, they would worry much less.

Religious and political factions have been plotting the end of the world from the beginning, as a sort of ultimate gesture. Birth and death are mysteries. The birth and death of mankind are likewise mysteries. And where there is an unknown, pretense prevails.

 

* 855 *

My taste is the opposite of a tolerant taste, and most of what others love leaves me cold and unimpressed. I am difficult to impress, yet so eager to be. Yet, what I love I love with my whole heart; when I find a love worthy of sacrifice, then I sacrifice gratefully. Ama, you are my all in all; I never despair when you are near.

I preserve my innocence through a heavy contempt and cynicism of all the timely issues that electrify the world and its media. Saved by a laugh, I mock at all the fads and fashionable ideas, the great, oh-so-great topics on the table at the moment. Ultimately, time is boring and eternity fascinating. What is eternal in the new is all that matters.

 

* 856 *

There is much that is lovely in each of us, much deserving of love, yet not everybody can appraise this, few can see our deepest beauty, for it takes beauty to see beauty, and what is easily loved and by everybody requires little beauty to see, for it is obvious, and what is rare and profound and divine requires the rare and profound and divine to apprehend, and thus the one who can love deeper gains a mystical reverie.

 

* 857 *

Blessed are the poor? "Poverty is a sin," my Niviana claims, and pooh-poohs my systematic indolence. "Will I be loved as I would be loved?" we hopelessly pine, and settle for what we get. We must contend against the Amazons before we can marry one: you know a truth by attacking it. It is the Poet's to Name, a poet is a namer, and Ama we have named each other in folds and folds. Yes, the wealthy, the rich in spirit, rich in imagination, in creativity, in verve, justify life and make it wholesome for all. Exuberance is the ultimate generosity. Blessed are the rich in spirit.

 

 

* 858 *

"When Jesus is mentioned, men forget their knowledge and accept the apparatus of prophesy, miracle, positive supernatural indication by name and place and claim on this part to extraordinary outward relations; -- all these, which are the prismatic hues and lights which play around any wonderful genius, they regard as of an adamantine reality, and in the select society where Beauty, Goodness, and the Soul are named, these men talk of 'preaching Christ,' and 'Christ's being the ideal of Man,' so that I told them it might become my duty to spit in the face of Christ as a sacred act of duty to the Soul, an act which that benighted pilgrim in nature would well enough appreciate."

So says the Sage, which reminds me of that maxim, "If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha." These cult figures get exaggerated beyond recognition, and yet I recommend you face yourself in the mirror, then look upon heaven, close your eyes, and let the Utter Divine speak to you unmediated by any man.

 

* 859*

We learn our mother tongue during a window of youth: second tongues come with an accent. Likewise, the first time we fall in love, we learn the cadence of love, the language; the first time we experience the divine, whatever tradition or religion, we speak those terms and tropes, the sacred language, naturally, without an accent (or if accepted, an accent common to our people). For every language in the world, there is a corresponding accent when they learn English – so many stereotypical distortions. Likewise, a Christian who converts to Buddhism as an adult will have a Christian accent; a Catholic who converts to atheism speaks differently than a Protestant who does so; our first experience marks us for life. This is why there is such a fight to secure the "innocence" of the young. Every extant ideology hopes to impress them while they are impressionable.

 

* 860 *

The Holiday, usurped, as were many other tropes, from the Mithras cult, continued its gift-giving tradition under these terms: we give on Christmas because God gave his Son to us, and the wise men gave gifts to infant Jesus to honor the new King. So let us give ourselves to the world as incarnations of the All, of Ama, and let us give gifts to others to honor their divinity. Of course there is a spiritual giving; those of wealth can gladly give wealth, but those of other means will do well to give from their own riches: let the poet give a poem, let the singer sing a song, let the charitable give charity, and let the penniless give their bare presence.

 

* 861 *

Our life-narrative on any given day resorts so often to a synecdoche or metonymy of our current preoccupation – "How's life? Well, my car just broke down today" – and indeed, a moment can last all day if we dwell. What at this moment defines your life, gives it meaning, what does this part of your life stand for? Something now in today's terms, and, in tomorrow's terms, looking back, probably something else. What we talk about, think about, feel about, act upon, this is our life, the whole of our life. Know, therefore, how to insist your mind upon a few solvable challenges and ignore unsolvable distractions. What is the dominant fact at any given moment? What concerns us, what do we care about? We have some choice in this.

 

-- R ᴤ88s Я --

Perfection Is Easy

www.perfectidius.com

AMA LAUGHS!

 

 

Update, Allays 840 - 849

Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:

Greetings!

Well today it happened; I got the first nip of that frostbit bug the nip of Christmas. As this entire season pivots on a day, and that, the shortest of the year, a stop to pause on meaning of it all.

The Holiday, usurped, as were many other tropes, from the Mithras cult, continued the gift giving nature of it under these terms: we give on Christmas because God gave his Son to us, and the wise men gave gifts to infant Jesus to honor the new King. So let us give ourselves to the world as incarnations of the All, of Ama, and let us give gifts to others to honor their divinity. Of course there is a spiritual giving; those of wealth can gladly give wealth, but those of other means will do well to give from their own riches: let the poet give a poem, let the singer sing a song, let the charitable give charity and let the penniless give their bare presence.

Take care, Caretakers!

 

* 840 *

In a relationship, what a fight is about is never what it's really about. It's always about one of two things, respect or love. To amplify the terms takes us on a journey of all we call motivating in human behavior. Most couples don't know why they fight half the time. Daily life is a theater of seem, while the inner maturation evolves and transcends. We wake up one morning and surprise to find ourselves suddenly wise.

 

 

* 841 *

Deep at the core of each of us shines our Uncreated Deathless Self, which sheds creative light upon all the universe. We exist to unfold that flower, and everything we accomplish and don't in this life reverberates and amplifies through the spiral unto eternity. What a man or woman thinks to offer or prides in may, like the  stag's love for his horns, prove his downfall when he ran from the hunters' dogs and got stuck in the thicket, whereas the legs he blamed as feeble would have been his salvation; so our deepest gift may not be the showy one. It may be the hidden light, difficult to behold, few in friends, and therefore all the more worthy and precious.

 

* 842 *

Our body decides before reason: every gesture and blink accumulates constellations of meaning, till we make a conversion, till we choose an idea, a person, a cause, to fall in love, to assume the mantle. First, we fall in love, then, we see her beauty; first, we choose a cause, then, we see its evidence. Reason is an afterfact, a pruning tool for dental work, to cleanse our capacity of doubt, our teeth, against counterevidence and for friendly evidence. The choice precedes the reason. Our body decides, and so much of our full experience contributes, with daily increase, little button clicks and lever switches, ever and always, always and ever. The spontaneous choice marks the work of a lifetime.

 

* 843 *

The body is memory, remembers all our deeds and words, contains its full past in the skin of the present. Our full body of influence is in the full difference our existence has made upon the world – an infinite sum, and infinite reaching. Not only our brain remembers, but every scratch on the ground remembers us, thinks us, recites our name. The full constellation of changes we've made to the world become our resurrected body after we pass our immediate skin. Thus the eternal return of the same amounts to the widening spiral that begins with our initial difference, and the difference it makes for the universe.

 

* 844 *

Were your sense of smell magnified a hundred fold, you might not enjoy your friends so much, nor they you. Wisdom is knowing when to overlook.

 

* 845 *

What is fashionably called "New Atheism" at the moment seeks to establish itself as a durable, reproducible, practical set of beliefs able to instantiate a worldview and a correspondence lifeway – as all balanced religions and philosophies do. Since, per its name, it exists as the negation of something extant – namely, theism – the morality of New Atheism is a morality of the gaps. Wherever the Christian morality fails or seems to fail, in popular sentiment, New Atheism markets itself as the reasonable alternative. In this, they are much like the Native American philosophies which emphasize their ecological conscience when selling their viewpoints alongside the much rationalized, much overly-rationalized philosophies of Christianity and Catholicism. Atheism is the shadow of God.

 

* 846 *

The world is cruel. Every joke has its butt, and what makes us smile like the envy of our friends and enemies? Our entertainment is in gunfights, torture, execution; our romantic relationships end in heartbreak and humiliation; our life in sickness and death. Life feeds on life, what we eat must suffer and die; entire species are devoted to living within one another, feeding off each other's loss. We are cruel to cruelty: our hate turns against itself, or otherwise we would have no objection against it. Yet, guilt is merely violence turned inwards, and blame and self-blame are so many modes of sadomasochism. Pity is cruelty with a good conscience; righteous indignation is an excuse to be cruel. We enjoy another's pain so long as it is farmed as a villain's come-uppance. How to escape the suffering? Indeed, what of our instincts, our life, wants to escape it? Only when we come to see life as the Game and living as play can we atone ourselves with existence.

 

 

* 847 *

We've always ventriloquised the Absolute, the God-term of whatever our system, so that priests can condemn and apprise mankind through the rhetorical figure of a God, or atheists by a cosmic eye looking upon the earth as an unimportant speck, or, in our fear of machines, as if a computer would see the truth of mankind, and replace us: every fiction projects our personal views, the way the guilt of the paranoid is projected on a government out to get them. Claustrophobic in our Cave, this skull of shadows, we escape, cast our glance at the sun, and seek the voice of authority.

If whites are the most solitary culture, the most given to austere solitude, or time with God, it is no wonder they are the most terrible and awe-inspiring. God is solitude. Stand alone, regard your own portion, insist on yourself. Perhaps they are cold, perhaps they are hard – lone wolves, world conquerors. Mencken, in his usual manner, characterized them as the most cowardly, and perhaps they are the most familiar with fear – white-as-a-sheet from fear – but the cold climate of their roots, the terrible elements that marked their environment, gave them an iron clasp of power over themselves. This is why they stand as Universal, they lack particular ethnicity.

You call me West Walker, O my Ama, luster after the setting sun. Perhaps you are correct. If in these allays I stray belligerent against this religion or that, this country or that, whatever group I define myself against, I hold it as a necessary fiction for giving myself room to grow.

 

* 848 *

Memories are repeatable experiences. We know experiences can repeat identically because, even if we compare them as different, they must be referenced to a repeated same. Repetition is meaning. Memories are the first meanings, assumptions the second. Assumptions abstract from memories.

 

* 849 *

"Nonbinary" is a one word oxymoron.

 

 

-- R ᴤ88s Я --

Perfection Is Easy

www.perfectidius.com

AMA LAUGHS!

 

Update, Allays 829 - 839

 

Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:

Greetings!

 

As I've oft told you, I've been editing my first novel, Madeye (2006), and once I've given it its final rinse and press, I will gather up a large cloud of my various books and blitzkrieg the market: I figure if anything at all sticks, that will be my inlet. After all, it takes just a fissure to let the moisture in that undoes the stone; likewise, the fungus disperses its spores so immensely that few are the places a slice of bread can sit out unmolded.

Natalie remains a struggle; the job remains a struggle; the marriage remains a struggle: they are three struggles that are also educations, which I push back into the mantel of my self-education, bringing what lessons I can from my daily humiliations.

 

Take Care, Caretakers!

 

 

 

* 829 *

If you see two, know there is only the One. Every duality is reflection. The upsetting triad breaks a unity into a progression, a stream into a deltic transformation. The four again collapses into twos and One. Five is power.

 

* 830 *

If I laugh a bit, I enforce my distance. It is not mine to drown in you; it is mine to burn. I am the phoenix, made for flame, the craving and satiation of passionate bliss. You are the Ocean, I very well know, so let me laugh a bit, as with a cruel joke, mocking at tragedy, for I will not be drowned in pity. I would rather be cruel than surrender. Endless moralizations will not absorb me: my innermost virtue is Independence. I flee forever from you. I would rather be evil than owned. Ama, I yet follow you through heaven and hell and love you always. What is this but our dance -- resistance and submission, escape and pursuit?

 

* 831 *

I like the fresh look upon the face of somebody I caught off guard. They glance at me with a startle, before they decide how to react. In that first knee-jerk reaction, perhaps a hint reveals itself? I've had those who, due to our official relationship, kept things polite, only to later expose their hatred for me. A few secretly loved me and never fessed. I guess I somehow knew? How is it I meanwhile am so obvious to everybody always?

 

* 832 *

If I speak the truth, they say they do not hear. If I shine my light, they say they do not see. If I reveal my heart, they say they don't believe. Yet they do. They harden their hearts against me, but through a chink in a crack in a crevice my light gets through.

 

* 833 *

Conscious conspiracies are relatively rare, but unconscious conspiracies are the norm everywhere. Every group, sex, and race conspires against the others, all the others, in covert, ingenious, let us say even daemoniac subtlety, and our participation may be so disavowed and hidden that, when faced with an outright expression of the same, we are horrified and oppose it. Talk of world conspiracies bespeaks paranoia, but paranoia is justified, they all really are out to get you, in some sense. As we each belong to various groups, some by choice, some by birth – I'm an American, a male, was raised a Christian, am of German stock, and each of you has your own list -- we are consciously and unconsciously loyal to our various identies and willing to sacrifice for them. We know and are known by subliminal signs, invisible gestures, and secret handshakes -- only this we fail to see.

 

* 834 *

Anxiety is the inner, stress the outer, the tensions that situate us within our worlds. Coping with, managing, and accepting our dominant positions requires wisdom, and the playing of placehood – making the most of a difficult situation. The stresses inherent in our world as an endless clash of cultures, a war of all against all, spiritual warfare, with some material warfare mixed in, internalize into all of us as our principles battle for dominance. That is life from one aspect; true enough for what it states, but incomplete, in and of itself.

All religions state chaos came first. Perhaps Order came first: Mattria reflecting on Ama. That one which is two which is everything – her body is our world of tensions. To escape the game, to escape all situations, is to atone with the None. This is the act of suicide, euphemistically called Nirvana or Peace.

In this life, tension and stress characterize our days. Our necessity expands to the edges of the universe, our spiral clasps all and more. Our wounds bring us bliss.

 

* 835 *

In poetry, repetition is the norm, and disrupted repetition means something; in prose, irregularity is the norm, and repetition means something. Our days rhyme, with habits and routines that reduce whole seasons to a single day. A difference in routine means something, transfers energy into different directions.

The conjunctions of pleasure in the day keep the prose flowing – lapping tea, swigging coffee, having a shot of alcohol, something sweet, a half an hour mirror meditating, all these manage the progression of meaning through time, make life liveable, predictable, endurable, comfortable, fun.

Ultimately, our being and becoming are from our needs, our core. Habits add a rhythmic to the needs, and yet if the routine doesn't answer their flow outwards, from need to fulfillment, we suffer.

So many diseases share symptoms together that a discerning doctor must make subtle distinctions. So with the depressions, anxieties, boredoms, and perplexities of our days. What is needed may not immediately manifest to our imagination. Fantasy helps.

 

* 836 *

Novices see the war as black and white, their side obviously right, the opponent so obviously wrong they must be evil to deny it. A master has proper respect for his opponent. Children make the most noise about super-villains, but adults respect a worthy adversary, and learn from their opponents.

 

* 837 *

Winners believe in necessity, losers resort to chance. "How is it the powerful have imprinted the world with their language; our faith with their creeds, our schools with their math, science, poetry; our economy with their capitalism? How is it the powerful became powerful? Surely, by theft, and theft from us. Yet they preach equality, let us approach them on this ground." This is the strategy of the weaker, and for what it's worth it's clearly effective. Yet we all must continue to hive our genius into art, to pass the fire of fires down to our children and their children. There is no disputing taste? But all the world is a dispute over taste. That I insist on my Truth, my Way, my Tradition bespeaks my Self-reliance and Self-expression. Honor your source. Drink from your roots. All your ancestors toiled to provide you with the tools and weapons to approach your world. Gratefully take them, and add more of your own.

 

* 838 *

We each live in multiple situations at once. We have various identities -- gender, sexuality, religion, race, class, education, occupation -- and various allegiences -- to family, church, friends, culture. These energy fields orient our eyes to certain facts and away from others. A fact is meaningless in and of itself, only interpretations have meaning. So while we live in various situations, those situations cross each other out or intensify one another, so there are vacuums, quiet spots, trigger points, violence or peace. Like waves, troughs can cancel or intensify each other.

So an African American lives in a complex of situations, with clusters, statistical norms, stereotypes, and outlier behavior, untypical, unpredictable. Amidst his identities and ties, there may be a conflict between his race allegience, his religious allegience, his political allegience, and his allegiances to his parents. Where they are all in sync, the motivation is intense. Where they cancel each other out, there festers ambiguity, stress, and doubt.

 

* 839 *

I can talk for a glance. Shivers of you throughout my day restore me to my own. I'm hopeless in my swamp and drowning, but then you skate down a moonbeam and cheer me up, keep to my task to seek my goal at all costs. My life orbits the One. When I am able to shrug off the arrows from my flank, I will feel the better for it. I collect these piercing arrows from my flesh and fire them back again.

 

-- R ᴤ88s Я --

Perfection Is Easy

www.perfectidius.com

AMA LAUGHS!