Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life:
Greetings!
I've barely written as of late, despite the various projects I've begun (the Seamings, the Emilegends). My mother in law, Nouhad DeVries, has passed, at the age of 72; her funeral was today. My employment as a Peer Support at Our Place ends upon February 28th. We have all recovered from our various bouts with the flu. As the family has been processing the new terms of our existence, I've felt less inspired to write, though various projects continue to gestate in my unconscious.
As it would be difficult to work a job with my three children on Spring Break, Summer Break, sick days, half days, etc., we are considering that I go back to working as a free lance writer. I am good at this, but after doing it for 5 years I got burned out. I've had two and a half years to recharge. We'll see.
Take care, Caretakers!
* 918 *
Men are great idealizers and women are grand enough to sustain even the loftiest of ideal projections. Recall Emerson with his divine first wife, who died young and perfect. Later, in his second relationship, he would complain about the "Mezentian marriage," a sort of forced coupling between life and corpse: "Marriage is not ideal … the soul is alone … it must progress in ten thousand beloved forms and not in one … it passes on to the new …. The Universe is his bride." Ama alone is equal to my love, my endowment; I could disburden myself on no other but the complete all, and suffer her smaller frame Niviana to receive me in shocks of revelation, poised and pillering my immediate soil so we no longer come together like claps, but the eternal clasp of interlaced fingers. Have, not hope. Now, not tomorrow. This alone is real: you, me, us. The Self is sacrosanct: no God, no Prophet, no Son of God or Mother of God, no Aya, no angel, no Holy Spirit, nothing at all may violate the sanctity of the innermost. We are wed, you and I, because we are already one and have been unto all eternity.
* 919 *
What I name I can then command, but the nameless commands me. What I formulate, antipicate, foresee and explain I work into my rhythm. The stubborn boast of difference frustrates my expression. So much of my experience, my life, my vision and goal, lies inarticulate within me, so this other man, articulate in lesser things, takes the spotlight and leaves me in shadows dreaming of sun.
Poetry is the music of putting this with this and this – ultimately poetry is a nuance of repetition, the spangling of constellations. The music is necessity, the topics artificiality; if I get you singing along, the argument is won. Philosophy, the defining of terms, and grammar, the terms themselves and the logic of their interrelation, require a different talent than visions and dreams. One may be merely a lover and also a poet, but the philosopher must hate to purify himself of contagion. Power is distance. Seduction is never through truth, but beauty, and beauty is the desire to collapse distance.
I find myself hungry for nothing, hungry for hunger, wishing I had an appetite so that I could enjoy. Food curdles my tongue; I'm bored. Nothing to do but sit, nothing to do but wait. Something in me works, within my mind, the deep of my mind, yet the fire of passion hides in the embers. My inner garden works her terms.
If I insist on my truth for the wrong reasons, I will insist all the more till I find the right reasons. Where she touched me passes all argument. There is no arguing against experience.
* 920 *
Every genre comes to bloom – the high or the low, the easy or the astral. Renaissance painting prints the high-water mark of painting in general; painters persist today from sheer momentum. Superhero comic-book art in the West came into its own in the middle of last century and exists now mainly to inspire Box Office movies. Astrological charts once involved subtle characterologies, but lately it's hard to find the fine from the pretentious noise.
Opera had its day, but nothing new is being said that way now. Once hunting was vital, now it's a sort of sport. Necessity keeps its edge, but mere tradition grows empty and requires blasphemy, rupture, and schism to reintroduce a glance on the Divine. Mystic experience is the center of religion; many speak well of God, but few experience Her. Aesthetic experience is the center of art; many speak well of poetry, but few know how to experience poetry or cherish it for the highest divine it can, at its best, verily be.
Great symphonies require the musing of eager audiences: where all the world looks, the divine may deign say; but now that high music has past its day, nothing world-shattering can come from that cup.
New genres will emerge. Perhaps one day we will be able to write literal dreams and share them. Internets, hyperreality, electronic music, perhaps a direct mapping of cognitive patterns without medium – who knows? We may innovate a genre or perfect one extant. When a medium is in fever, it transmutes, metamorphoses, and becomes what it could never have become otherwise.
* 921 *
The forms of Romantic love derive from the Poets' exaggerated cases of unrequited love – unrequited by design to intensify them into severe impossibilities. How is it then that I am eager despite your requited regard? Truth ripens into eloquence. We each hold the truth of our experience, at certain nodal moments we set the stage for our full expression into life. Contentedness is true wealth; ambition is the counterfeit. Yet you and I find that Inspiration is the Blessing, the Muse the true redeemer, and you my Muse, I yours.
* 922 *
They call her Muse, the sisters nine, who inspire music, as does Kvasir's wine, but I call her Ama, her mother aspect, Sovf the Holy Ghost, the genius of language itself – so find me out in my echoing bed. I feel washed over like Ahab's bones, rolled like dice by toes of waves. Even as my wife loses her mother, and I lose my job, that greatest of blessings, inspiration, finds not my lips. Love bids me sing, yet I've gotten too fat and lazy for love. I feel to fall, to cocoon myself against winter's blight. I scarcely write now – my one fine phase – and glut on Emerson's Journals, Melville's Whale, a biography of Joseph Smith, old favorites to warm me in my shiver. I'm friend to fate, yet hope to barter life for life, love for love, blood for blood, and prize my triumph over one Niviana who is my dawn and dusk – painted sky of far away tells. Sweet sustenance, American things, yet I see better than Emerson and hope stronger than Melville. I find Smith a bit saucy and full of bravado quite different from myself. I seek quieter things. I gaze into my mirror, I read my own allays, I sing again my Ama hymns, and hope to lift myself up from this swamp by my own hair.
Am I saving for the singing days? Certain friends remind me of my abundance, overread and oversexed as I am with love for her. Most friends make of me a poverty, complain and chide and ill advise. Only in the presence of a few do my treasures emerge, and this learning exposes itself, all the wisdoms I've hived away. When the singing days return, all this reading and preparation will reveal in my work a compound interest. Meanwhile, on these shivering days I save every cent.
* 923 *
Nothing is simply true; everything is rhetorical. Keep that as a talisman.
-- R ᴤ88s Я --
Perfection Is Easy
www.perfectidius.com
AMA LAUGHS!
