Emilie is born

LOVE IS BLOOD (to the mother of my children)

 

Your name I quickly sought

My name you finally took

We named our passion “Love”

We named its fullness “Lara”

 

Milk white your secret bosom

Milk my joy within you

Milky your rising hill

Milk threads you to her mouth.

 

Blood made you a woman

Blood made me your man

Blood your push and Pallor

Our blood sprung from our love.

 

=====

Emilie Lara June was born after an easy delivery on Wednesday 5:37, weighing 8lbs 12oz, and measuring 21 inches.

 

Pictures will be forthcoming.

 

She is healthy and beautiful, as is her mother.

 

Daniel June

 

~~

 

 

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

 

~~

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

 

parting gift -- an essay entitled "synesthetic reading"

I will be gone a few days to aid in the birth of my daughter Emilie Lara June. So I will not be emailing much. Here is an essay I composed just now, as a token of fidelity that I will return shortly.

 

Synesthetic Reading

            Kafka’s novels the Trial and the Castle present dreams, characterized by strange and fantastic events which the reader and the reporter of the dream might ponder over, but which the dreamer and the characters curiously don’t wonder over at all. In the Trial, the protaganist K. never asks the fundamental questions about his case which you or I would insist on knowing first: “what’s this all about? What’s the charge? This court can go to hell: I have a life to live!” Instead the plot involves a mysterious charge of guilt by a mysterious court, which is taking session in somebody’s attic or who knows where, and K takes the matter seriously. I could never understand why K would cooperate at all—but I was taking the book too literally. The entire setting and plot is mere articulation of the mood of K, the mood of Kafka, the mood of the 20^th century Jews, an aspect of the mood of the 20^th century itself.

          Schoenberg caused the halocaust. Perhaps an unnerving joke, but true, nevertheless. The exposition of the joke makes it obvious: the horror-show aspects of the world wars were a result of and not a cause of the mood of the early 20^th century. Philosophy precedes history, just as poetry precedes philosophy. The greatest heroes and villians – both of whom I love and purr gratitutde towards – are ever philosophers.

          All people resonate, not just the religiously bound. We could easily say the Jews are the guilty, but in America it is a different matter, and the Jews here are sublime and greater than anywhere else, as my own favorite authors, who first initiated me into philosophy, were Adler, Bloom, William Goldman, a cheerful sort, the life-affirming sort that accords with the American Spirit of affirmation.

          We are first of all Needs, second of all Mind, and yet body is mind, face is brain, and our physiological type as well as the national type which has for centuries sorted through our genes and also impressed itself on our collective and personal habits and traditions, mingling them with the choices of our personal eternal, makes us eternally—American! Your body will die and never be resurrected. But because it will never be forgotten, but integrated into mind, it will never die in the first place. Know a book by its author—always judge a book by its cover. Indeed, would you read another man’s mind, merely mirror his face and body.

          Zizek, Lacan, and Freud instinctively chose the most horrible of ideas as proof of truth—truths so true we would deny them to escape them. That is not too far from our own tactic of calmly drawing together a man’s love and fear together as opposites conjoined into a joint dynamo.

          Body is mind, and if the body were burned to ash, the mind would survive as an atom of body, holding in the entire history. What was called “Neurosis” only meant one of the various forms of anxiety, a tension that catches mental energy into physical muscles. All mental illnesses pertain to the nerves of the brain, of course, but also to the body, and really, is always and only a block of flow, an intentional anxiety strategy. Mental illness knots the flow, and this as a tactic that hurts like a fever is a tactic that hurts, to stop the overflow from oversensetivity. Sensetive nerves are the basic cause of mental illness. It is also the presupposition of artistic greatness, and artistic creativity is the source of the greatest happiness known to mankind.

          If history were a striding man, that man sat along time upon a crucifix until he got disillusioned – priests why have you forsaken us! – and in the Renaissance he became Greek again (that is: beautiful). The Reniassance tripped into reformation, stepped back up with Enlightenmen, and balanced the tottering with the Romantic extremism. And then came the moderns. The modern movement comes from a fusion of romanticism with enlightenment, giving us Modernistic Nihilism and anullment, the analzying down to bits we saw in Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Joyce. Joyce’s Ulysses, seemingly intending to show the stream of conscious as described by William James, fails utterly to present it. The book puts the stethescope to protaganists temple, to catch the inner speech, but misunderstands, for the inner-speech is so immersed in symbols and feelings, that to listen to it without that context renders instead this abortive schism widely knows as “the greatest novel of the century.” Well it is a great modern novel anyway.

          Modernism, as a tripping of the legs, falls into postmodern spasms. We are Allism, the return of the Renaissance by the subsumption of everything since– ultimately, the ever returning balance of classicism. The “American Renaissance” is indeed Renaissance, though not of the deathless America, but of the Italian Renaissance again, after it had tried out the Enlightened eye of Aristotle, and the Romantic heart of Plutarch. This is the key to the world’s future, embodied in the writings of Emerson and Whitman. “Song of Myself,” “With Antecedents,” and “By the blue Ontario’s Shore” contain already the future history.

          This is our dance, I merely comment. Is a song even heard if the listener holds still? Classicism is the great antagonistic balance of control, but Romanticism is a lunge of strength. Romanticism is to make tyrrant one great passion, but not the will itself, which would bound all passions to their opposites and varients, and control them al (the classical motto “All things moderated by knowing yourself”). To return to the classical Greeks, having gained the passion of the Romans – the excess to rule the whole world! – requires refinding Greek loves: sex and wrestling – the two great forms of love. Coupling and fighting, and the honor of the friend, and in the mind: synesthesia.

          Anxiety pluralizes energies so the will cannot move among them. Anxiety slows down what indeed needs to be executed slowly. We could, however, end up like Zizek, who uses the same grammatical forms ad nauseum. His sentences contain little bits of horror, and the rest is padding. “Love, sex, self, religion, they all are made of castration, failure, paradox, and knotted repressed secrets of hidden void” – yet the man never simply says “Life is Shit.” A drunkard is more direct than he. Instead we see his grammatical tics, verbatim motifs, and endlessly recycled anecdotes. The postmodern man aspiring to be modern again!

          With the guilty Jewish authors of the early 20^th centruy we have a balance of the America Jewish authors of the late 20^th, who are stronger, better, and healthier for mankind. They are a sign of what America is becoming, and of our own place as Allists. Just as the early 20^th century authors can be set alongside each other, so we may hear what in them resonates, and by being set close and resonating, all else is shaken off and dissolved, leaving the one nerve thread that runs through them all, and that to stimulate the muscle of all else they do, so too do we resonate and hum when we breath into each other. The child’s body is born of sperm and egg, but the child’s soul is born of orgasms. Our resonance is in this line of Whitman’s: “I reject none, I accept all, then reproduce all in my own forms.” We resonate through the joy of challenge at recreating a whole system. And this means reading the world aright, reading the world synesthetically.

          To gain control of a system is a joyful challenge. To master it is bliss. To internalize it and move on from it is relaxation. To address the next more complicated system is happiness. Each book is a system. An infinite book can be read forever.

          Style is personality. The person too is infinite.

          Live your life as a blended braid, making all of life thick. Do not relax completely, but relax from that by doing this. Make every moment count, and do ten things with every one thing. Move worlds when you read.

          For above all of the senses, we have Sense, the integrater of them. This gives us a Sense of what it is all about. But this Sense above the senses can project images back to them. Listen to a song. Imagine what the song tastes like, how it dances, how it reads, how it looks. Then integrate them into one poetic idea. Concepts are seen and have literal shape, but to the fleshly eyes they are invisible. The mythological understructure of all events is also invisible. But you may imagine a plausible guess of them, and impose this over them. With every idea, and every abstraction you read, affix concrete images. Reading is among the most active of activities.

          Postmodernism is ugly and spiteful, and spits on beauty. Because it has exhuasted itself in modernism, it resorts to the ugly and the extreme to stimulate itself. Pain at least stimulates.

          Consider how a God walks. If one of Lux’s children were to walk from person to person through the dimension of language, he would walk through different styles of words, different shapes of mind, and like a man through a funhouse, appear distorted in every mirror, and yet come out the same at the end. He retains his integrity through all subjective interpretations that translated him – nothing was ever lost. Squint at the Bible in translation and you will see the Hebrew letters.

          Do you understand my parable?       The American Renaissance is still with us, and has never been lost.

          But walking beside the infant is the Satan, our old friend. Satan, an utterly pure and yet utterly deluding spirit, walks within a miasma. We never see her, but we imagine her, for she projects a thousand false images, and we always get her wrong. Yet though we always get her wrong, and though she does not exist out of the lies we say of her, her perfected purity and utter God love is intact underneath.

          That is my second parable? Is it also understood?

          Of the senses, hearing and smelling and taste resonate, sight and touch resonate, and so we have two forms of senses. This break down is our clue to the synesthesia of a pointed experience.

          Science studies external objects, and is successful because it knows how to affix numbers to sensations. To fix a word into a term, and then to affix to that term quantities, is a great philosophical success—necessarily not a scientific one, and science is merely the extension of philosophy into the world of material objects. The artistic is in imagining a possibility about the world relevent and fascinating and plausible enough to invent hypotheses about; science describes the types of tests by which to attempt to “falsify” it. Science, therefore, bases itself on tyranny over language, making one word refer to one thing, and that word to be receptive to quantities.

          The goal in my philosophy, however, is to dissolve all terms. I wish to let the reader see the meaning in all words, to see the terms in all of them; my rightful reader will neither quote me nor spit any of my terms.

          Sensual experiences are facts, how we feel of them, meanings. There is a correspendance, therefore, between formal logic and literary criticism, and they are analogous and Gemini. Signs must stand for things eventually. A symbol abbreviates a set of signs with a sense of more possible signs, and thus a feeling of profundity. But sign modification and modulation alone will bridge all this profound potentiality. The word must be crystallized into a term, and the term into a concept.

          Getting a word to stick to a thing takes an aparatus of enforcement. With science, tradition and the stick of money beat down fakers.

 

          Books are mostly conventional, at the gross level. The subtle level is in the timbre of the pitch. The timbre of the voice expresses the nuance of tone, the feeling of attitudes, which not only gives every instrument its class voice – a voilin does not sound like a guitar – but even each violin its unique sound among other violins. A book internalizes its context, to a degree, and so is representative of its author’s age. And yet it is as much a reaction against the age as a presentation of it – both are the same thing. The book encapsulates a large amount of context, but sometimes biographical and historical background amplify a literary experience.

          Nietzsche for instance writes against and about the conventions of his age. In his aphoristic works, each aphorism corrects a common prejudice, but one does not even need to know the original prejudice in its context, for he evokes it. One understands every truth by carefully studying deceits. One sees ultimate reality by spying into illusions. One learns the divinest truths only from demons. Beyond Nietzsche’s beautiful rhetoric and charming poeticisms, one can sense the conceptual sign language, the logical methods by which he transmutes signs and symbols.

          Jokes too are bits of logic. Every joke follows a subtle logic meant to demonstrate the wit, the intelligence, even the sexual viability of the jokester, and this by a complicated emotional calculus.

          The will stands within a field of vectors, and is given a purpose according the needs which empower it. What ever the entity, whether rock, man, or goldfish, insofar as the will is seperate from the needs, and so is in external matter, and has made various parts of matter into one thing (will is the “nothing” that binds all matter together into resonating “something.” It is an expression of needs seperated from needs in order to act) the will acts and is through matter. The will is knotted.

          Criticism is the attempt to translate literature into philosophy, art into truth. Philosophical and critical concepts are written in exacting jargon, but literature and rhetoric are yet part of all writing. We are conscious of them aas enjoyment and tone, but otherwise we don’t notice them. Style is to seduce the mind to think thoughts. Beauty inspires strength.

          The interpretive method is to produce summaries of the literature, both justified and fitting, and handling these summaries as if they were cash symbols, to move and exchange and build with them, while the literature yet stands in tact. Using an appropriate and justified summary can lend itself to exciting and controversial connections – the joy of lit-crit.

          To criticize well while you read, you must be able to toggle levels of focus – upon layers of structure. The world itself we see conceptually as a grid, though we consciously see thick detail. In the same way, a given mood is made of all possible emotions felt simultaneously, but in such degrees as to give a seemingly simple shape. The “circle of mood” focuses conscious experience in one place, one feeling, by the unconscous anchor of all the other emotions.

          Hysteria is a nervous mirror of the world, an amplifier. Poeticizing is another amplifier. By putting your passions into poetry, you feed  them back into themselves: they collect compound interest.

          To be sensetive is to be irritable, and to be irritable is to amplify experience into overflowing pain, till it is expelled again for relief, in the form of anger or dance, gesture, and overthick speech.

          We think in our muscles, our concepts are in our body. Let your every twitch be a philosophical dance. If you flow, walking down the street shines more glorious than Shiva – and you the same. Tone is nuance, timbre is subtle, your full self speaks in every offhand gesture.

          Read with your whole body. Subvocalize the words. Vocalize them at times. Imagine the tones and gestures of the author. Imagine the scenes described. Make images of all the concepts he uses, map them out in the margins, or in your head. And care as much as you can, read only the books that shake your arteries and churn your guts. Read as if your life depended on it.

 

 

~~

 

 

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

 

~~

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

 

menstruation (revised)

Menstruation

                Menstruation is the fountain of youth, the river of love by which Hera and Aphrodite were rendered virginal and adolescent. Menstruation stands for creative power, and envy of it by artists is evinced everywhere in all myths, a womb envy to counter the muscle envy of women.

            To drink the menstual blood of a virgin has long been a rite of creative initiation. Even in the Christian myths, the disciples and Jesus himself are meant to drink the menstrual blood of a virgin, from the lips of the holy grail – and the cup stands for both the heart and the yoni, and wine always for blood. The motif began at the wedding of canaan, in which Mary (Mara = sea) instructs her son to turn water (semen) into wine (menstruation), and which he coldly agrees. He finally drinks the wine himself, and is punished with a snake bite on the ankle, upon the female insignia of the cross.

            The desire for virginal menstruation is to avoid ingesting semen, a mythopoetical taboo since the Sumerian myth of the godman Enki who fertilizes the land through river waters of semen, which Ishtar steals to make the eight fruits of knowledge, which he steals, by which he is self-impregnated, and lacking a womb, suffers, until Ishtar takes each of his children from him to her womb, including Ninti, rib-woman, Mother of Life, who is most potent as life because she comes from his rib—that is, from the cup of blood his heart: happy ending or no, it is best to drink from a virgin.

            In Genesis, knowledge leads to sweat to achieve bread, and so bread and sweat are one, and the love of woman and suffering for her children in menstruation and birth. Sweat is semen, and blood is egg. Our own idiom has us put “blood and sweat” into the projects we love the most, and together they stand for life. Blood stands for life, for life is a flood, and even the mind is a stream of consciousness. Ocean is blood is woman, and rivers are semen are man.

            The ancient gods supped on ambrosia and nectar, and again ambrosia is menstrual blood, and nectar is semen. Perhaps the Soma of the Hindus was from the dung mushroom, which is red, and the context suggests the same awe and terror before the female creative function. The great taboos are put against the holy blood of God. To be washed in blood is to be baptized, and the castrated man is not rendered powerless, but creative, just as a frigid woman also is rigid, has a penis, the inner penis of her soul, for men contain a womanish side, and women a mannish side. Castration and frigidity are empowering and disempowering both – see the full not the partial!

            Dionysus was celebrated for turning water to wine, and worshipped through baptisms and drinking the blood of Dionysus; and here the two births suggest being born first as a man, and again as a woman, or the birth of our inner nature.

            The rose stands for beauty, for the heart, for the cup, and for the vagina—it is also the flower of beauty and true love.

            Vampires are the undead men who have gained the charms of death, having passed to the occult world of magic, and come back to seduce virginal women to drink their (mentrual) blood—and that is the whole charm of them. Odin also died as a sacrifice to himself, hanging from the world tree and balancing on the pierce of the spear Gungnir—the frictionless spear of his penis-consciousness, the irrestiable spear of penetration—and yet riding the world tree, that is, Goddess All, is as sexual as riding a horse.

            Blood stands for race and genes, as a family is of one blood. The downfall of a generation of gods at ragnorak comes ultimately from mixing bloods of allfather with the beautiful giant Loki, whose children in turn have enough God and enough Giant to overturn the world.

            The apocalypse says the bloody moon is the end of the world, but the moon is the moonstruator, the ebber of the bloody sea, and a bloody moon is doubling what the moon is, the cycling of woman. The moon is always bloody: we call that tide.

            Therefore, as the serpant is the castrated masculinity of woman, or really, the aggressive part of her that she supresses, and lives in her womb, so too does Leviathan, Whale, Moby Dick, Midgard Serpant; sailors call her tempestuous, and peaceful. Pacific and belligerant. Thor who is Jove who is Yahweh fights the midgard serpant, the original motif is Tiamat, mother of life, against Marduk her grandson, and therefore An and El are the first fathers (sun and Saturn); and though the Bible has Yahweh boast of his control of Leviathan, yet a great number of dragons destroy heaven and earth by the end of the Bible. Odin opposes the Fenrir wolf, and this is the womb itself.

            Ash is the tree of regeneration, and the first man was named Ash, and his wife Vine. The grape and wine are ever women, intoxication, life, blood, and menstruation. Ash if the first man, Ash is the world tree, Ash is the ark in which humanity survives the end of the world.

            Odin dies to gain occult powers of interpretation and magic, and comes back. But to speak poetry, he must drink the blooded mead of Kvasar, hidden like menstruation in the belly of mother mountain. There he loves the giantess who protects it—giants stand for the terribleness of nature—and their child in turn is the god of poetry, and be taking the mead, Odin grows the womb of poetry, the menstrual beauty of wine, the poetic inspirer.

 

body language

Body Language

            After I had read a book of William Gass’ I was not at all surprised at his face: red, bloated, a glint of the child-molester’s perversity in his eyes, a tad saggy. Exactly. I suppose I get this from my job: when I take orders through drive thru at Starbucks, and meet the angels and harpies who order my drinks, I am trained to know what they look like, by the mere manner of their ordering.

            Derrida is handsome and sometimes charming, but too clever for his own good. Lacan is nervous looking and just an all around creep. Nietzsche looks strong and yet lonely in all his pictures. Rand is of course ugly and blinking way too much—such a troubled woman. Voltaire is exactly what you would expect: note the wry smile. Emerson is dignified and sublime: I could kiss him.

            The movement is half the beauty. No man is captured in a photo. How he looks when he talks says as much as his words.

            Body language is very complex...and with just a shiver of the eyeball, a dilation of the pupil...we siren-call others into our lives.

            Language began with action. Animals of all sorts communicate among their speech through body language. In so-called “primitive man,” language was only gesture and tone. Gesture is an incomplete action that suggests the full action, tone evolves from the sound of the breath during a given exertion.

            Our refined language has not surpassed or dropped gesture and tone; indeed, when you read a man’s writing, you ought to imagine at least in at least one of your registers of imagination the bodily gestures and tones of voice implicit in the text – this is the real “reading between the lines.”

            Ancient communities (“tribes”) to exist had to transmit their culture, and they used the same methods we use: music and dance. “Pure” music is an anticoncept, since it abstracts the meaning beyond meaningfulness: there is no music without dance. Music and dance are two parts of one thing. These concepts work best when universalizes. All a man’s movements are a dance, only some or more eloquent and noteworthy as “Dance” than others. All words are music of tones, only some seem more cold and logical, others more emotive (as if “cold and logical” were not in fact positive excessive feelings. As if “coldness” did not imply a submerged hotness to hold it in place!)

            Language itself is the greatest technological achievement of man, one we all participate within, one we all use from childhood to death. And again, all language is tone and gesture, music and dance. An idea has a thousand external forms for one internal form: perhaps one external form epitomizes it best. Once you discover this, you will realize that all people, even common people, can teach us interesting ideas, if not by their philosophy, then in the ideas lodged in their lives.

            We listen with our muscles, we think with our guts. Concepts are made out of feelings – even the most abstract of ideas are not only in the nerves of our brain, but in all our nerves, in our whole body. Philosophy is embodied. Ideals are in the muscles. We might rightly reduce all language to a gridwork of arrows and equal signs: causality and identity, but this gridwork lies in the skin and nerve tissue. The mannerisms and motifs that coalesce into a writers style are the grid which the daily experience of his life, the same sort of daily experience we all hold, fall into, and bend like light in a lens.

            Thus all art holds an informal message, the mud and guts message. The artistic framework in only a method of transmission.

            All music is dance music, whether it seems so or not. All art works intend to work us into art as well. The literal meaning of a gospel is thin, the figurative meaning thick. The tone of music infects. Listen to a frantic man and you will become first frantic, and then angry with him in order to push away the infection.

            “Trust only the ideas you thought while walking” is sound advice. Yet even sitting alone, when we think of an act, those same nerves are stimulated. All emotions come from motions, or the imagination of them. Stories of others only seem like stories of others. They are about us filling each of the roles. The story is the closest thing we have to gaining a direct experience through the ears. They are shaped like our personal memories are shaped.

            Rhythm stimulates the muscle imagination. Moods and emotions are literally “nerve” music, of which external, formal, artistic human “music” is a representation. Music is pure tone, tone is grunt of effort, grunt is emotion.

            Abstract concepts derive from concrete matters, and when they have matured, they flow back into concrete matters. Above heaven is another earth.

            Therefore, strapping a child to a desk – usually with the chains of propriety, which the child comes to fear and respect one way or the other – makes no sense. I wish to reintroduce child labor. From the age of six onwards, all human beings should be made to work out their lessons by producing things. The true “government influenced economy,” would be only in job placement, in finding a way for all people to contribute as much as they could. We would expect little from a six your old, but at least something, and the elderly man too must work – perhaps a pittance, perhaps a couple hours a week, but always something. We ought to work fewer hours a week, but all of us should work for all our lives. 40 hours a week is oppression. 20 sounds more likely.

            And jobs ought to be shaped to educate us, so the six year old learns more than he would in our current system, by gaining lessons that always have a practical outlet, all the way up. The tribes know about dance and music, but we lose our roots, we fall farther and farther from our needs, and fulfill ourselves through complicated symbols rather than the direct fuck. This is good, we are more intelligent, more subtle. Yet we must not lose our center. We must find our self-centers.

 

focus and art

Focus and Art

                All life wishes to prolong and repeat itself, nor has an afterlife escaped the fantasies of any people, though some explain it away into this form or that form, but the needs remains. Art is sex, the same instinct, to improve mankind by making more of oneself into it. Therefore, the art work as child metaphor resonates well with the male fantasies depicted in the story of Pinocchio, a man’s handiwork come to life, Frankenstein, a man making life out of corpses, The golem, a man made of clay, and therefore of course Yahweh who lacking a womb enacts the male fantasy of making children out of the dirt (ultimately an anal sex fantasy), and this in parallel with Prometheus who makes man of clay, and the Egyptian story is similar, though with Wotan it is different, he both makes the universe out of a giants corpse, and man from the tree of an Ash, and here Ash stands for Mother Universe, the old fantasy of making the very woman we can’t control into the child we seek, and of course Pygmalion makes a statue that Venus brings to life. As in Pinocchio and Pygmalion, the magic of a woman is at least needed, reversing the traditional role of man as giving the magic semen that contributes the small part to the woman’s work. So it a male fantasy to create life without woman, the mind is a womb, and hands are the vulva that bring forth.

            Therefore, whatever a man or woman makes, reflects best into the hidden heart of the man and woman. Our hearts are hidden from ourselves and the world, just as the secret of our age will take millennia to figure out. Art is the most transparent window to the very center of human life: as you create so you are.

            It is not that all our body parts will resurrect – that would make death a mistake, and not a purpose – but that all we create comes back to us: we give birth in two directions, inwards and outward simultaneously.

            Love and Fear, Sex and violence, Passion and power, the same pair said thrice, when combined make creativity, the kaos and eros that goes into the creative act.

            The sexual artist wishes to make children for this world, and so he approves this world, and being thick of self, pridefully narcissistic, in love with his life, he wishes to repeat it and expand it: the world will be remade in his joy. Murder and suicide characterize the other artist, who makes the world ugly so a to justify himself and to take revenge on the universe, his parents, god (these all stand for the same thing) for making him alive. The pained make paints heaven, the overjoyed man founts gratitude. The artist is either escapist or he sings paeans.

            Power makes beautiful makes lovely. Through creative art, power and love become one – the only divinity is the man who makes, who exists forever in time.

            Nietzsche mistakes himself when he contrasts Classicism, as the calm and powerful, with Romanticism, the passionate and decadent. The categories don’t work. Classicism included a long period, best seen in the creation of the Greek Pantheon, where every God is powerful, and is both fully good and evil, the perfect balance of opposites – in this Nietzsche was correct, Classicism is the perfect, easy, gentle coordination of otherwise violently antagonistic opposites. Therefore classicism is the unifying of two. Romanticism is about extreme and exaggerated passion in one thing, a sort of monotheism turned art. Exaggeration – is that not the essence of ugliness? And would not a man twist all his energies into one direction precisely because he lacks energies independent enough to become powerful and in need of balance. Those who harp on one string lack the power to play a melody.

            But here Nietzsche mistakes himself. The Classical genius was reborn into the Renaissance, a fullness as before, and immediately the infant fell and broke his leg, in the Reformation, but regained his strength on the other leg in the Enlightenment, and the enlightenment balanced itself with the next step of the Romantic period. Romanticism is the same movement as the Enlightenment, and would not exist without it. Therefore, Nietzsche is not justified in comparing Romanticism to Classicism.

            And so we Allists do not see “this NOT that” without saying “also that and not this” and also saying “both” and “neither” – four is beauty. We take from the classical the calm, simple, abbreviated, the harmony of strong desires, but we see in Romanticism the overjoyed founts of gratitude, the intoxicated that wills one great excess to make a leap – we take both, all, everything, we say “no” by saying, “yes, and change it in this direction.”

            Power beautifies, and yet it is not beauty. Power beautifies, power balances, power makes lovely, but it doesn’t love, nor does love love power, but respects it; love loves the work of power: eternity is in love with temporality.

            A secret desire will usually have greater success than the open one. Even if the desire is not blameworthy, there is something in all men that wish to trip up, tone down, and dissuade a great passionate desire. Us passionate extremists must be subtle and modest, or so over the top arrogant that we are ironically taken as ironical.

            The exhausted resort to pain to stimulate themselves, the need stronger drugs, violent movie, rape scenes, newspapers filled with child rape and foreign wars – to be stimulated at all. Being depressed they don’t have much action, and must pain themselves to react.

            On the other hand, for the sensitive, in which a pin prick would kill us, we learn to control the inflow of energy by casting it back out again. Most children are traumatized – childhood is an extended trauma! – but trauma is too much to process, and requires an intense interpreter to either imitate it or to moralize it. If we lack the will to transfigure our pains, and give them the brow kiss of our blessing – a powerful man, a classicist, the renaissance man of all things could do it – then the energy can with little transfigurative will be repeated back out again. The raped child becomes a pedophile, the catholic child becomes a catholic adult, the democrat child remains a democrat. Or if he has enough anger to transform the energy into a negation, he can moralize against it, fight for the pains of others become a hero. This represents a greater will power, one able to instate moralizing habits. He says NO to many things, he condemns, he judges. Finally, a greater power is in the transfigurer who can both affirm the thing as it is, and also transfigure it in the future so that it is better. This is the Allist, who takes all things as existent, and therefore necessary for interpretation, recreation, and integration in the growing whole.

            We seek the enlightened romantic. We know that all the streams of history pour into us.

            The more sensitive a man, the more he must turn what he senses into a language, for words are the finger of consciousness. With words we can handle and bend all our experiences. All thoughts are bodily, all concepts in the muscles. Such a man will invent a sign language in all things. “Nature is the image of the mind,” Emerson said, “To study nature and to know thyself are the same thing.” If one is immersed in society, around other humans all the time, part of the church, part of the school, popular, he is so over stimulated by the world that he is bend and finds his place, and imitates and becomes popular. Irritable people start to imitate. Overwhelmed people start to go along with the motions. A great willed man looks with disdain at this instinct to imitate, and wishes neither to imitate nor deny, but to transfigure and by remaking things, make them his own.

            Most people require mental therapy in their lives. The mind is the organ most complicated of all of them, and most susceptible to illness. But few of us become institutionalized. Because the most common therapies seem like normal behaviors. Mass hysteria, movie theaters, parties, drinking and drugs, and all manners of bad habits (any habit that one personally regrets but does anyway) are in fact all psych drugs that keep the person alive and functioning and as happy as he knows how to be, even if he complains (complaining is another therapy).

            The secret desire has more success than the open one, and we would add that the deepest desires are invincible, are “drives” and will succeed always, so that we always get what we deserve. But life is longer then we think, we lack a view for the big picture, we think nature has tricked us, God has abandoned us, we curse our parent – and all of these are mistakes and for the wrong reasons.

            Life is beautiful. The world is Mattria, our mother and ourselves. We call her cosmos, we call her All. The world is right, I myself am great and beautiful, and any man who feels himself to be a God is de facto God. Learn to say yes to all things, and to transfigure them into their opposites if need be.

 

slowly working out my ideas of WILL

Economy of internal energies

                Per the four kinds of habits, there are four vectors of energy: feeling, thinking, saying and doing, to put them in order from gross undifferentiated energy into the most crystallized and specific.

            A man is blocked when his energy is shaped as if it would arise to the next level, but is knotted down and unable to – a series of metaphors will make palpable this daily experience. The heart sphere has thick armored knots of feelings, and the assumptions flow up through this to the thinking habits.

            The body is the ultimate direction for all energy.

            The leaping of energies could be viewed like the leaping of electrons between shells in an atom. Once enough energy is reached, there the electron assumes a higher place.

            Feeling is based upon the experiences of present memories, which flow like an ocean, the waves are assumptions which catch up the water into the sky of consciousness, and clouds, rain, and bolts are thinking, speaking, saying.

            The conscious emotions are the clouds, the living experiences are the ocean. Assumption brings the one up to the other.

            All energy aims to discharge itself in an action that will draw back a source for more energy still. Ultimately, this is to give the person either stability, or growth, the two opposite and intermingled needs of the life-form.

            Manic-depressives have low energy. This makes them majorly depressed. Therefore, the brain forces the production of energy through the cups of pain, those bits of pain that fill with energy – we will not stray far from our metaphors! – so that the system stays alert, toned, and ready for action. But the lower energy from the needs is building, and that is the nature of their system, to build and build energy and then to tackle all goals in the overflow of mania. It is like a cloud that builds up charge for months, and then attacks every obstacle with a torrent of bolts.

            In fact this is the way of all people. To save up pools of energy, differentiated for this purpose or that, this is the normal flow of the mind at all times, and we never know what our next fancy or interest will be, but once we find it, we have endless energy to pour into it till we have cut some external knot and let the influx of our accomplishment throw us the next level of growth, and then stabilize. The outflow of energy is the tumult that breaks the old layer, and lets us grow thicker and stronger. Boredom and peace and reprieve allow us to regain our balance. Writer’s block is ingenious, especially if you have a dozen projects to oscillate between.

            Here the conscious willing I acts as a swerver. His own force is self-generated and not related to the needs or desires, and so it is in the unique place of guiding the system – and that is how it is free. Yet will power is by nature very weak, it only swerves desires this way or that. The best human being has a chaotic heart combined with an uncompromising will power. Next best a normal heart and a normal will. Worse is the chaotic heart and weak will.

            When depressed, the will lacks any desires to channel, and so it must move on its own. But to overextend itself in this way causes it to grow rigid. To do what it does, amidst the pain, causes anxiety, since it must cease all the little distracters on its own.

            Pain pools need energy into itself, as the outflow of need. And so pain and suffering are great stimulants to life. The will itself when it forces effort feels it as joyful pain. It is joyful pain when it forces itself, it is agony pain when it is forced to focus by something else, a desire, fear, or illness.

            The pressure to communicate is fulfilled only when we see that another receives and responds to our word. Though the words are written or said before that, the energy must move into an internalized representation of an external person, we must see him take us in. Otherwise, the emotions remain unfulfilled, nor can they come back into us as more refined and developed emotions, for we are alienated and lonely.

            Anxiety ceases a desire, and lets the will work freely. The engines on the outskirts of consciousness allow us to see relevant things and save us from distraction. We are more conscious at any moment then we may even know. But focus is a small part of consciousness, the very central crystal ball on the blanket of consciousness.

            Anxieties are desires that are knotted and unnamed. For if we could name them we could unknot them. But as knotted, the cease up a desire or temptation we didn’t want to fight with. The best way to overcome even a chemically induced panic attack is to put your feelings into words, name them, label and sort them. Demonology and psychoanalysis and scientology all really work because they give names to private and unknown problems. Whatever my “demon” really is, once I name it, I can use it.

            As there are two forms in any thing, the gross material form, and the subtle spiritual forms within it, and also the central form that binds them both together, so the knots of anxiety make a rigid external form to cease up the fluid anarchy of the inner forms. Fluid has a form and yet can fill a thousand shapes.

            Great art is a dipping down of states. The philosopher slips into metaphors and then comes back talking about abstractions, perhaps even hiding and forgetting the metaphor. The poet dips down into abstract philosophical thinking. The hero dips into brief and deep speech. This dipping is the only way to make a river of flow upwards to well from the earth.

            Just as a man must use an institution to fight an institution, perhaps using a lawyer and the legal system he represents to fight the bank and the financial system they represent, so too does the inner man need to use strong desires against strong desires.

            Pragmatism is our means for understanding the true purpose of a final form. The ideals in our head seem to come from our attitudes and moods, but sometimes the under-mind has goals we do not know, that we could never achieve if we did know, such as to lie to others. We need to deceive ourselves in order to lie efficiently to others.

            Therefore, use the pragmatic trick of looking at the harsh reality as the true secret purpose of the ideal planning. Communism was never a failure, because all the theories promised were really to make the secret police and all of that. Or if a marriage is broken up because of this seemingly innocent problem, then the problem was created only in order to break up the marriage. Paranoia is a beautiful thing if it is used wisely.

            The building of jism, of lightning thrusts, happens underground, and bursts forth full grown, as if by revelation. All political, social, and personal realities are desired and intended, on some level, or they could never exist in the first place. People are as they wish to be.

            Bad habits provide a fine example. Do not assume that they began innocently and gained enough autonomy to defy you. You do not smoke because you were a dumb kid. You wanted to, you needed to, you always would find bad habits by which to secure yourself in a way of life you desired. It is like art: it worked for you. People build habits in order to not expect much of themselves, to reinforce laziness, and laziness itself to avoid a feeling of alienation or impotence. People do bad things and become bad things in order to forgive others. I forgive my father, my mother, or God, for abusing me or neglecting me, but proving that I am in fact a bad person, so therefore they are not so bad. And then I establish a way of life to let my love of them punish me. Perhaps I want to punish myself. Or whatever else. Those habits do something, they mean something. It is not that my will is too weak to move them, but that it doesn’t want to move them in the first place.

            For this little weak will, without the great desires to swerve can’t do much. But he can do a thousand subtle things to secretly align all the desires into his intended direction. The will is power, the will is craft, he seeks in all things to increase his power. For his is the need to break stability, to grow. Thus he fights against habits, just as he broke to get out of the center and become mortal in the first place. Will aims to destroy the old self and necessitate a new self. All the trauma about us is self imposed, intended, good. We bring it on. We evoke it.

            The joy of the will is to strain to his limits, and earn the pride of relaxing. Self challenging and self overcoming or his purpose. The habits and the heart would prefer love love love always. But he sabotages love, forces it to make sacrifices, reveals or creates painful truths for love to struggle against.

            Desires are swerved by self talk, by evoking the signs that act as magic – all language is magic, is all the magic there is.

            Needs are by nature in a state of death or prebirth pleased. But the separation of will signifies risk, growth, uncertainty, glory, the expansions and thickening of love.

 

rant about children's cereal advertisements

 

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                They surround us, everywhere; life a fluid they pour wherever they can to pour ideas in our heads, to get us to spend our money, to spend our labor earning money to spend on things we don’t need at all. And! They’ve got a whole industry paying psychologists, conmen, manipulators, lawyers, writers and artists of all types, to manipulate your mind.

            The corporations invent an image for themselves – pure illusion. Whatever sells the most the longest, is the genuine face of Coke, Nike, McDonald’s. Yet in their commercials, they express a wet dream fantasy of how they wish us consumers would desire their product. Fake consumers (actors) are paid to have fake conversations about how their dumb product is ultra amazing. Lately, the theme seems to be costumer frenzy for a product too amazing to be real.

            Let’s start with an easy example: children’s cartoons. Children are frenzied most of their day to begin with. But those children’s cereals are the worst. Cereal itself was invented by Kellogg as a nerve depressent, to lessen the nerves and let the young adult break the habit to masturbate. Corn flakes was invented to be bland and boring. But you would not have guessed it from these commercials.

            The coocoo for cocoa puffs presents a coocoo bird that desires like a cocaine fiend for his next fix of sugar laden cocoa flavored cereal (the kid doesn’t need this garbage at all of course) – such that the bird has no ambition, purpose, or life outside seeking this narcoticlike sugar cereal. And when he gets a bite, the bird explodes in manic revelry, like a saint in ecstasy, the angels dance on his tongue tip, and he is not only coocoo  -- but stark raving. The chocolate tastes cheap by the way. Its gross. But the cartoon bird, voiced by some dumb actor, pretending to go crazy for this cereal, inspires the kids to go coocoo themselves, which means always and only, because kids don’t have money, that they must annoy their poor parents with demands for coocoo cereal.

            One commercial I happened to see had the bird climb a high mountain to see a guru, seeking peace – through Buddhist meditation? – from his overwhelming obsession with coocoo puffs. The wise guru asks him “why do you seek to escape it? Enjoy the chocolatey goodness,” at which point he himself procures the narcotic cereal for the demonic bird, and the coocoo bird takes one bite and is manic as a comet.

            All these children’s cereals are peopled by the same sort of nut cases: a “silly rabbit” whose overwhelming fixation in life is to eat “trix cereal,” which he is rebuffed in being a mere rabbit, when “trix (which rot your teeth and shock your insulin) are for kids.” As if a rabbit seeking his next trick wasn’t bad enough, the plot is even worse for the other cereals, including endlessly and mercilessly chasing down a lepracaun for his “magical” sugar chunks in a bowl, or in the case of sugar bear, the bear haunts, assaults, and robs his desired cereal from “granny” – elder abuse. All to get the sugar fix. In this way, the children are encouraged to exhibit the behavoir we would least like to see in them: gustatory mania.

 

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Perfection Is Easy

www.msu.edu/~junedan