"engines" a habit

Here is an essay I’ve been working on this last month, but I still feel I am not ready to publish it. You can tell me what you think. It’s about habits.

 

Daniel Christopher June

Engines

                Every habit gives energy. It opens a channel from the needs that flows more and more energy into itself, until the behavior feels primary and natural, requires no artificial effort from the will to persist, and takes more energy to not perform it.

            All the habits interrelate, and they are aware of each other, negotiating with each other; this negotiation we call “thinking,” and all thinking and acting comes together as a system.

            Our full system of habits, our “way of life” our “go with the flow,” includes also our unwillingness to start new habits, our excuses against them, our hypocrisy to praise them anyway, if that seems prudent. It’s all in there, it’s all part of the system. But a system requires habits to manage all other habits, and scan new information for relevent intellectual objects.

            All intellectual objects are simple, easy to communicate, hardly anything at all. But to transmit a sophisticated figure, something many sided, in other words, to create a schema, takes a long time. Learning a new language, assuming you are still young enough to be receptive, requires at least a decade. For us, English is an easy language, the easiest language to think in, but as an adult’s second language, it infuriates. This complex, many sided, ever so tricky beast “English” requires ten of our most formative and impressionable years. And only somebody who learns English as his first language, as his mother tongue, can possibly write something great in it. His ideas may be superb, but he must belong with English from the very start, and preferably without too many distracting other languages to sap away his strength. All hail monoglots!

            As with the individual, so with the culture. Ideas take decades to permeate the soil. New ideas require a few centuries before we take them for common sense. These ideas must be argued against, argued for, blood must be spilled on behalf of them, courts and lawyers must be cheerfully exploited and misused for them – such as the idea of evolution, democracy, rights, freedom – before the idea becomes so all-pervasive, such a part of every other idea, that we cannot think without it.

            When the idea is everywhere, and every other cultural idea contains parts of it, we say that it is “universal.” Converting a nonbeliever to Christianity is no big deal: he already knows the very face of Jesus a thousand times over from billboards, tee-shirts, movies, etc. He knows how a Christian acts, what a conversion looks like. And the early Christians were not that much more baffled, for similar mystery religions had prepared for the upstart cult. Today, we all know quite a bit about all the major world religions. We have stereotypes, we have fluidtypes. It’s all in there.

            We have taken in an engine that puts all these ideas in place.

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            An engine is a complex habit that both creates other habits, and also filters what information may become conscious.

Each set of memories becomes a story, and genres of stories become types; as we experience enough types, we build archetypes, or pithy basic stories about life. For the greatest motivators in life are stories, and to act in life is to live a story. We teach through stories, we learn through stories, we entertain each other through stories, and we can listen attentively to even the most unbelievable stories if they are told right. How readily each of our lives resolves to a biography.

            We develop a roster of archetypal stories, with the stereotypical players. Even if they are fictional, and only happened in the imagination, they program us to act; they base a worldview, the most important part: how to live within a world. Striving for greatness and intimacy,  importance and love, each person focuses on the story that best fits who he has already become, and aligns his personality with the character who wins what he wants to win. Personality is a style come to consciousness. Literature, as well as society and its traditions and habits, assign us roles to play and choose from. One can have a range of styles being a doctor, but there are things he cannot do, even if legal.

            The “engine” interprets stories into daily life. It takes from archetypes and builds pragmatic habits fit for the messy confusion of the real world. An engine is a hermeneutical tool, working unconsciously to align our behavior to the paradigms of memory. We build habits personally and individually, but unconsciously the engines support these decisions, and limit what ideas are allowed to become conscious. We must choose only special relevant ideas to think of.

            Each man specializes to do his work and this is true of course for the guardians of knowledge, who not only memorize a series of facts, principles, and stories about a given subject, but also get a mystical sense for how it all hangs together, the intuitions that one learns through years of deep study—though only a genius could simplify and formulate them. And even the simplified rules that come from intuition do not thereby grant intuition, because they are stereotyped, and lack the “mystical” “gut sense” that guides the mind through the thick misty world of the unknown. Hard work cannot be escaped. Our best bet is to keep from the same work being needlessly repeated. Yet engines allow experience to be readily summarized and transferred.

            A novel can be summarized to suit its fans, yet that summary can never substitute reading the original. Encyclopedias only point directions, they do not educate. In the same way, there can be no replacement for experience, and decades of it. We assume and assing many engines, and thus become part of society, for we must know what ideas to take in so as to fit in, though our greatest contributions to society will come from no such prefabricated engine.

           

 

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            Engines take the shape of a Me, a We, a Persona-of, or a Persona-for.

            Let’s look at a We-engine. When one belongs to a race, a religion, a tradition, or a nationality, he inherits a We. That We is something that thinks for the I, in its place. The I is the autonomous conscious will, serving the Needs of the Self. The We also serves the Needs of the Self, but not only. A We exists for the greater whole of Us. A church for instance. Once one has replaced his I-my-name with We-the-Christians, We- the-Americans, We-the-scholars, We-the-feminists, or whatever name We takes, We gain a new power. The We acts as a filter and an orienter over all world-materials, and lets the I gain possession of many ideas unique to that We which have grown in refinement and power for centuries. Because the we has copy written the ideas, and has evolved to be receptive to them, any man, once properly initiated, will be able to gain powerful ideas that before he could only acknowledge.

            Christianity, like the cold virus, survives by an ability to quickly mutate and adapt the individual. The We-inheritance of Christianity includes all the accomplishments of the religion. All the hymns, theologies, martyrologies, biographies of saints and sinners, philosophies, self-help manuals, etc. are inherited quickly and without interference of the critical I. There is no need to seek a monastery to inherit these millions of hours of work upon a few ideas, encoded in books, symbols, arts, and shrines: they are disseminated in self-protecting forms in every niche of our intellectual culture. The I as servant of the Needs naturally is extremely critical if not downright xenophobic against outside powers that wish to usurp the system. Consider how most of us avoid addictive chemicals or bad habits and never cease to speak ill of them.

            The We-engine comforts us that it has tested and approved all its recommended downloads, and that we may feel the comfort of faith that we need not be critical over what belongs to Us-the-group.

            With a lack of critical resistance to these ideas, they chain together and dominate the system, so much so, that a serious and honest Christian can “hate father and mother,” leave his family, even curse them, perhaps leave for India or Africa, give his complete life over to “Christ” (the warm big-brother poster child plastered over the virus’s face), and feel he is being the best human he can by infecting others. That is, everything normal and natural to his needs is usurped for “the greater glory of God.”

            Let us be fair. This human individual, by sacrificing his Me to the We, has indeed gained many instant powers that he could not fashion in a lifetime. He has all sorts of thinking habits, weapons and tools of many forms, which he neither has to understand nor criticize, and now empowers him. He may feel fit to judge all men, greater men, to condemn friend and foe, according to what he now calls a “higher truth,” which unlike a higher truth, he need make no effort to achieve. But alas, having subordinated his I, he cannot use these powers primarily for his needs, but must always use them for the greater We. Even if he wanted to use them for himself, he wouldn’t know how.

            The We-body contains all the people who share the We-engine, and teaches us how to recognize our own. It is in this way alone that we can take conspiracy theories seriously, that the world belongs to, and is fought over by, great collective conspiracies. Such subversive groups need not plot consciously. Their great power is that they create global crimes and triumphs without any individual realizing what he is doing. Even still, Christians, Muslims, and Mormons all talk of converting the whole world to their We. Not that they will accept a fake conversion: the convert must be thoroughly normalized.

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            Engines are sorters of this and that. A this is important, but a that is passed over. An engine is the interpreter. By reading the last section of Nietzsche’s Human all too human,(The Wanderer and his Shadow), we see Nietzsche give a set of aphorisms each addressing this or that cultural object. We already know the objects, and we know the normal interpretation. Knowing the normal is important here. Seeing Nietzsche masterly interpret each artifact gives us a provisional pair of Nietzschean eyes.

            When contemplating before a mirror, choose a few ideas from your life or studies, and lay out a systematized set of questions to address them, a means of formulating your results, and reversing, inverting, and substituting elements. If you can do this, you will have done all that can be done in any interpretation. Lay it out, make it deliberate, and tediously go through every step. It is only tedious till it is automatic. The quickest wit was once a slow study.

            If, for instance, you are in doubt of a possible outcome in your life, the health of your child or the prospects of a job, and lacking control to fix one alternative, make peace with the worst likely alternative, and breathe easy with that option, so that you can let it go and work your effort into grasping, and not worrying.

            The most complex data, the utter chaos, have regularities that promise you, “from complexity a new simplicity.” Any data set has a cause and a nature. Know therefore that all conceptual thinking is the setting of a container to categorize objects, and using prepositional phrases to shape the container and orient it among others.

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            Society perpetuates itself by establishing a sense of what is normal, and a sense of what is desirable. Every man in society is constantly normalized. If he is sensitive to the final consequences of defying a norm – to be beaten and subdued – he will know to wince when a stranger on the street wrinkles his brow a bit. Our society is free, liberty for all. But in fact we are so normalized that we can be free – we have fully internalized the rules. But walk the street naked, and this freedom looks different. It is easy to imagine a thousand indiscretions, which of themselves have no weight in virtue, only in morality – and morality is the duty system of “being normal” – that will get you arrested and assaulted, for no other reason than that everybody else has been trained like an animal to react in a dumb and absolute manner. Most conversation is negotiating, and you can scarcely tell a joke without also carefully judging the faces, to evaluate how they are taking you.

            To be “normalized” is a pleasant process, insofar as you cooperate. But insofar as you resist, they will subdue you, with as many as it takes to hold you down. Yes, the great man breaks rules, but he does so as Hermes does, by acknowledging where the boundaries are, and what they mean, and skirting them. A man who audaciously breaks the rules, even if his actions touch no other human being, is a criminal—a lawless enemy of mores.

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            Words are a sort of capital. By putting words (desire charges) into speech, into writings, into memory, you have bought yourself a place in the world, and continually collect dividends upon it. Freedom of speech is necessary for the flow of powerful ideas, and without freedom of speech, there is no freedom of mind, no freedom to even think the things we would tell nobody. For we internalize the external. If adulterers in your country are killed for their sins, so is the part of you that would be capable of adultery, and that part of you is capable of many good things as well. It is like outlawing “hate speech” or “intolerant speech” by which they castrate their own minds.

            Nietzsche spoke of how forcing into men the engine for promising took generations of persistent will, with the artificial necessities of torture and cruelty to “make the memory” of promise-making. This idea that we ought to make promises, and our word binds us was not natural, but it is now second nature, and nobody questions it. It required a persistent and long-lasting will, imposed by necessity. In other words, tyranny is merely the first step to normalcy. All that is needed is an artificial necessity made into a compulsion. “All religious are at the deepest level systems of cruelties.” And what is made normal for society will kill off the abnormal.

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            A given We might fit with certain patterns of DNA better than others, and once it has filled this niche, it may induce selective mating, thus adapting the DNA to be more We-receptive, and it may also be adapted by this DNA in turn. Such a We becomes a race and heritage. Not all We’s work this way. Nevertheless, certain long established We-bodies oppose other We-bodies: one religious faction kills the other, and the parts they kill change the gene pool, the way individuals marry and breed – and this resurrects for us the old disproven Lamarkianism of the 1800s. Choice breeds choice.

            The Atheist-We has for the first time, and in our generation, achieved a great following. That the Atheist has difficulty being a “We” is long attested. For atheists disbelieve in the typical We-mascots of Gods and Spirits. Even the deists resorted to God as a mascot for Reason. God stands for an originator, protector, approver, and blesser of the We. No religion invented a God to chose some other people. The God, in turn, becomes the “voice” of the We-Engine in each individual, a sort of internal talking habit, or at least a complex of “religious” feelings that more than anything else orient the I to subordinate the Me to the We-engine.

            In Dawkins’ term, we would not call an engine a “meme” but a meme is only the information from which such an engine is instated. The engine, as a habit, is made of organized desires. The blueprints for the engine would be a set of memes, a set of assumptions, and again, the engine would filter through and latch onto the memes it recognized in the world environment. Ultimately information is not desire, information is not habit, and so the We-engine uses memes, but not a meme itself.  Once an engine is instated, no mere change of facts affects it.

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            Habit, and the proto-habits, instincts, were the first orchestrators of memories and assumptions. How we willed to remember, how we willed to abstract, solidified in our toddler years into autonomous unconscious processes. The structurer of memories is called the Mythic, and the structurer of assumptions is called the Typer. The structurer of habits is called the Engine.

            An engine is a filter of objects from the unconscious and the world, fixing a desire on them according to importance, priority, and difficulty. That is, the desires imposed unto mental objects by habit do not compete anarchically with each other, but the System of the mind uses an Engine to filter objects according to importance (how much desire they hold), their priority (who gets enacted first), and their difficulty (whether a desire can be enacted semi-automatically). This keeps the mind focused where decisions need to be made.

            Insofar as a conscious decision is unnecessary, the Engine will put the Trigger on the right Desire. It will build new habits the way consciousness builds habits, by seeing a pattern of triggers and putting the right desire on each of them. An engine automatic structures desire. Most desires require no full-conscious decision: they are all habit by now. And indeed, most decisions which require some consciousness do not require much. Rarely does the average man need to fully will anything. Yet, he who exercises grows strong.

            A filter against irrelevancies for the consciousness must necessarily be unconscious, but it could not have been completely instinctual, since the civilized world is novel and changing. Therefore, the unconscious filters must necessarily have had to been conscious to begin with.

            Engines aid conscious habit formation. Adults make very few big habits. They merely build upon and rearrange existing habits. Learning big habits takes much training.

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            An engine serves its source. When we build an engine we have learned from a group system, that engine seeks its system, and will tend towards others of that system. It will see the world as a set of arrows pointing the way to this goal.

            A group subordinates all to one mind. The pretty names it uses for group fidelity are “loyalty” “selflessness” “for the greater good of mankind,” “for the greater glory of God,” or some other magical formula to sell self-sacrifice.

            The greatest cause of all man’s problems is not his ego – in this the Easterners miss the boat – but in his Me, insofar as the Me is a socially determined, socially limited, socially defined function which imposes the wrong wants over the innermost Needs. The Me reflects the We, and to gain full control of the Me,  is to redefine and change the We, to change, electrify, and magnetize every person you know.

            It is for this reason that as soon as a new friend tells me of his Christian convictions, I know I have no mind, no ego to address, but only the Christian Me embedded in the Christian We. I will learn nothing original from this part, for he is no man. I must look elsewhere in the man, perhaps to his guilts, to find something original to him, something good.

            An engine is like a magnetized piece of metal: that scrap of iron points its own north, amidst the hundreds of other engines within you, it is subtle, but when thousands of you get together, you electrify each other, and charge your systems in the same direction.

            It takes a lot of work to cut out all the contexts from an idea, to make it fully your own. When Edison says that “Nature is his God,” he is going to be misunderstood twice. For such an overwrought concept as God has magnetized billions of brains, and these brains have written billions of manuscripts, crafted all forms of art. Let a freethinker live in a Christian town, and he will feel himself forever an outsider, even if he keeps fully mum on his views.

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            Missionaries act as culture spores. The system-structure of Christianity, built over thousands of years, is a malleable junk structure upon which hang the ornaments of greater cultures than Christianity. Just as the Renaissance celebrated Greek sublimity by painting and sculpting the Greek beauties, but with Jewish stories, so too does Christianity reinterpret the great beauties of the world in the drab but sellable frame of the Christian salvation mechanism. The drama, an epitomizing and abbreviation of countless ancient myths, becomes the scaffolding of the great ornaments of the Western world.

            Engines are inserted through violence. For some engines are too big for the mouth to take in, so the mouth must be bent. The mind’s conscious analysis can take in such a little bit of culture at a time, that it must be entertained by the meal, and only somewhat consciously analytical – this medicine requires consciousness! – and yet made dumb and unaware to the deeper implications of its dinner. It is like swallowing a sphere which is sweet on the outside, but sour on the middle. Only the unconscious tastes the inner sour of the worldview, and slowly, that poison will surface as if from your own soul. Once you have those engines in place, your world is shaped and lensed to see only those things the filters let you see. You fancy you live in the universe, but you are in a defined and limited world. The only way to escape your impending bind is yet another trauma, evoked by your innermost desire for freedom.

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            The smallest We is the We of my friend and Me. The Me is a persona-of our selves, adapted to the persona-of you. I have a Me that objectifies my I for my I and also for plugging in my image of you my friend. What I think of you is not your literal mind, but my artificial image of you, my persona-of you, and that persona-of you is malleable and intractable. I can dissect him, talk with him, negotiate with him, and all these modifications are real, and you will feel them when I talk again with you, for I will press that persona-of you, the manikin, as an interface over the external you. The external you I cannot see, but must conceive. I can see nothing in the world without having concepts to frame them.

            When I slip this manikin over you, a mask by which I can see you, you also see this mask, and respond. “You misunderstand me, you got me wrong, that’s not what I mean” these are implicitly parts of every conversation, as you and I negotiate with each other on how each of us should be properly understood. So much of  it is quiet and unconscious, that it need not come up at all, literally, but only figuratively. This is also the source of much manipulation, deceit, and fun.

            My persona-of her stays in me, but it needs to be plugged into her from time to time for her to breathe life into it. I cannot love her memory without plugging it into the real she. Were she to die, I would hold her corpse in my memory. I must grieve to manage that set of memories. Sadness is a mind in change. And to make flowers from the corpse, to make something horrifying into something sweet, this takes the natural alchemy of meditation, contemplation, and years of maturation.

            I must present myself to you, my “Me for you,” and if you are standing next to her, my “Me for you” and my “Me for her” combine like colored lenses, making a third “Me for you two.” Shades of light. Thus, by meeting different people, by mixing company, different facets of my I are expressed. My I is otherwise invisible.

            Living in the world, most of our thinking is yet imagination of possibilities, for we are acting towards our goals, fantasizing desires till finally we become conscious of them in a plausible shape. In this, tokens are fantastic. A token, a little bit of reality, a “fetish,” or “signifying object” are fantastic in that they make a fantasy plausible, believable, eagerly anticipated. “My church has a chunk of the cross, come see.” We require just a few words as token from our fantasy girl, maybe she could breathe a word of kindness, and we will take that in and mold it into a dream.

            For the potential is more interesting than the actual. My sister-in-law won a large sum at lottery, and spent it all on further tickets. And as everybody knows, not merely the miser, we prefer the means of pleasure to the pleasure itself. In this, money is the token by which to fantasize and dream. If I had a million dollars, I would spend very little, but make a bed of it and dream. Better still, I need plausible stories about how the million dollars should and could be mine very shortly, if only I hope. Hope is an opiate – hopium keeps religion profitable.

            Thus the Me I give you is mostly cage. I am playing with you. Secretively is an instinct in most mammals, but especially man. Even if I have no guilt or schemes, I tend to secrecy from sheer instinct. Some people commit crimes merely to hold important secrets, feel secretly important, and laugh at those who do not guess at their real importance.

            Look into your own Under-mind and he sees you looking for him. He tricks you. He gives you hobgoblins and changelings. Look what he did to Freud and Jung. The under is prankster. Look what he does to your in your dreams. He is a banker and a lover, he is the first god of all the universe, but takes the shape of prankster cupid – and cupidity makes the world go round: both love and money make the glorious orb spin. Love and money are concealed – and collective secrecy is a delight.

 

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            All our efforts will be braided by tucking each stream of conscious down again into the soil of memories. Do not drop experience of the We or the Me, for a good Me engine makes uses of all experiences. The man delights in ambition and politics, acquisition and property, and yet this already resided in the child who played and laughed. The man too is in love with play and festivities. For when the desires of the initial Me move the I, those instincts imprint. First impressions are the only impressions. All else are reformed from there. Hardly at all can we hear or see, nor listen to a symphony, but only really hear it maybe once, maybe more, in a lifetime, and the rest is preparation and echoing that one experience. “The mind is All, and matter his mirror” Emerson may have well said.

            We find this in the sexual habits, whose final shape depends on their earliest activity. The instinct arises or is shaken awake, and from that first decision, it becomes forever after no instinct but the living habit. You cannot escape your life nor even a second of it. The eternal recurrence: it is all part of you forever. Our youth is our home. Everything grows from this. The braided effort comes back to complicate itself, but never does it negate a stitch. We come to see at last the happy symbol. Atropos will not be turned.

            So we may well say before the world, “I am God, and your dismissal of me is your own destruction. I will never shrug nor wrinkle my brow for the faulty judgments of others.” And this thinking is grand and lovely. Yet the world retorts, “If you do not respect our mores of decency, we will despise and outrage you.” Not even God can escape the world.

            Language binds. If we fantasize, the events of that fantasy will never be bound without words, labels, and a name to access it. A memory can be purely of concepts, of abstracted ideas, but is yet a memory insofar as it lacks a name, is not itself abstracted, is still bound to a feeling of priorness, and a recallable flow, and abbreviated sign of a chain of events. Until that full chain of abstractions is itself abstracted into a definite and meaningful feeling, then that is merely an experience but not a meaning, not a concept, not an idea.

            The I is two hands, and its willing is felt in all the muscles, as a shadow of actual muscular exercise. So too is all desire felt in the body, in the heart and guts, and there is no desire or love felt in the head or behind the eyes. Concepts and logic are seen on the conceptual screen in our field of vision, or they are seemingly unseen until the moment of decision, but they are not felt in the heart and gut—only the desires we affix to them are felt in the soft of the body.

            The greatest engines of thought must stream line and automatize into unconscious habits, a series of mental operations, as the evaluator, filter, heirarcher, and builder. Such an engine must be able to swim with unconscious thoughts and fly with the conscious thoughts; it must be amphibious, the frog prince who grabs the golden ball of consciousness from under the well, the demon at the gates, Hermes, border-crosser.

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            As evaluator, the engine must change the intensity of desire, and thus rank it, rank what affinity the desire has for the center of focus, how much interest it is charged with to sink to the center of awareness.

            The conceptual field is like a broad ribbon that curls out from the forehead, and back to the chin. To “see” a concept, paint with your minds finger the letter “L” as you look up before you. Now blink. The “L” will be a white letter burned as an after image upon your retina. In such a way, concepts are always open before us, as open and diverse as our visual field. The concepts are ghosts, dimmer, and are only seen when we activate them, when they are triggered and flash into attention, or when they double a seen object like a halo to give it a catch on our attention. You can easily conceptualize a triangle over this very page of print. It is no longer in the conceptual field, but in the imagination field of memories and narrative) if you enact a dancing fairy flitting over these words. The fairy can be animated merely with a few word to trigger her and tell her what to do, but concepts cannot be told what to do, must be handled and forced to work by will power.

            The engine, as amphibian, regulates what memories and concepts, once triggered, are allowed to appear before consciousness. Sometimes this filter is too strict and rigorous, so that we can no longer think wrongly, illegally, sinfully, by which I mean, creatively. Such a person needs a little trauma.

            The engines are economical: they want your mind to focus on matters that need special attention, which cannot be solved “by the book” but require a fresh judgment.

            Reading a book of philosophy sets the concepts dancing, so that your mind is atoned with the author, for part of the author’s consciousness is forever repeated in his book, and encoded in the material book in your hand. Perhaps you will not derive a single concept from the book other than the overall impression. Even if the book speaks only of abstractions, you may only have a set of memories about reading them, though you have gained no new assumptions.

            The concepts cannot work without a visual field to intermingle upon. And see how the environment influences them. Live in the cloudy north and you will think cloudier thoughts, more abstract, more philosophical, less fables, less sun-stories.

            You can create new concepts only as well as you can draw on paper. Concepts made by the fingers of thought, the white lines of concept you can see when you blink, use the same art sense as drawing a picture. Learn to draw!

            Learn also how to sing. For the heart and moods move by the inner music of the undersong. And this sings in our own singing voice, or upon the strings we play in our internal guitar. Whatever we have poured ourselves into externally defines also the internal: as among us so within us.

 

 

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Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

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practicing to master

 

Practicing to Master

 

 

This is an essay I’m writing out to help structure my practicing schedule. I am going to sit on it for a while—just a rough draft. Your feedback is welcome.

 

                Postmodern writing lacks content, other than its obfuscating style, and this is consistent for Derrida, Lacan, Delueze, where the main message is in how it is side, not in important ideas, but in a sneering attitude. The tone is clear, though the ideas are not, a sort of mood music, an incantation or magical spell over the intellectuals, a style aiming to paralyze, bully, and ultimately seduce the weak to join the intellectual bully. Postmodernism, which could be called the rise of the mediocre, or slave morality gone intellectual, is best ended by the tyranny of a master morality and its discipline: great art requires great practice – and greatness is the only proper goal to a noble man.

            Great prose takes much practice, and not only practice at writing, but the creation of a strong consciousness able to face the biting truth of reality, and sooth it into eloquence. Style is the setting of a piece, the tone and mood. More than anything else, a world is defined by the consciousness which creates it, the style of consciousness that structures it into an experience. Within one universe, there may be as many worlds as there are perspectives. The strongest minds will be able to reduce it to simplicity, to directly express its nature. In this, ornament is central, for just as syntax and grammar imitate the moves and attempts of a mind in time, so too does ornament and rhetoric evoke the heart that supports and feeds the mind in action.

            A walk through the woods is richer if you know the names of trees: names allow a man to see individual things separate from their surroundings. The ability to name a thing requires eyes that see without words, a vision that knows how to paint an object into existence by naming it.

            Language becomes a playing field, a recess of the mind from the work of life, with the joy of syntax, the idiosyncrasies of diction, the poetical densities, the genius of the perfect word, and the resonance of words with words, the long strong focus required to construct a period, balanced with antithesis, climax, and even teased out with rhymes, puns, and subtle games of self-reference, such as a sentence within a sentence, a play within a play, a god before the mirror, a child giving birth to herself.. What is deep speaks to what is deep; what is superficial speaks to what is superficial: we must be masters of both: the depth of truth, and the superficiality of beauty.

            Read your work out loud several times, and read your favorite authors the same way. Combine all the senses, especially voice and vision. Style is joy, the joy of personality. A personality is nothing more than a conscious style. Mind is a willing, unified, changing, self-owned focus, but it is language insofar as it thinks in time, through images, and the handles it places on them, words, names, or images, so to skip from one to the next easily.

            Master morality requires the antidemocratic morality, the morality of subordinating that which produces more subordinated, and ordinating that which produces more ordinated. This is de facto life, each man resolves into his place, like a marble down a hill, finding his nook to perch, as high as he can, but more importantly, as stable as he can.

            Cut your works by 50%, read them aloud, construct your sentences in parallel construction, plan your essays as an architect plans a building, prefer the thing to the commentary of the thing, and show thing in such a way that the commentary silently shows itself, be specific, be likeable if you can, but authentic even if you cannot, write about people, use anecdotes, examples, quotes, and quotations. Over years of work, develop a theme.

            It becomes apparent over an author’s career the undersense of a theme in his work. More and more his novels resolve to retelling the same story over and over again. Melville’s quest repeats through all his work, Whitman’s motherdeath romance never leaves him.

            Aristotle wrote that “no great genius was ever without some mixture of madness, nor can anything grand or superior to the voice of common mortals be spoken except by the agitated soul.” You must take your whole life, subordinate the difficult, but do not cut it off nor cut off the best in deference to it. The allistic method is to use all, leave each part as much itself as possible, but relate all things to a larger schema. Your goals must be cemented together into one goal, hardened into a unified purpose.

            Each man shines brightest in one narrow direction; his success is in aligning that light to the world, and working especially through that aspect. Every style is based on a trick, a sort of metatrope, by which, once mastered, you could predict him. In the same way, the skeleton of a situation is transparent enough to the piercing eye, but a full ambience requires a lifetime of study.

            True practice is struggling at the edge of your ability, to continually test yourself, to plan on it, to stretch yourself further and further, to set yourself to make many honest mistakes, and to continually wrestle to overcome them. In this way, your skill circuits in your brain will be well-myelinated, and you can exact the best effect from a little bet of practice. Practice a new style, a new trick a new idea, slowly, perfect, and then build up moment. Set yourself for immediate critical feedback, a ruthless commentary on your work – get that coach and internalize him. Practice deeply and obsessively. Practice in the boiler room: make conditions as difficult as possible. Minimize the slack space, so your practice is much harder than the performance you must make.

            See the gestalt, and break it into smaller bits, which you can repeat each till you have mastered them. Break a skill into small circuit – cut up your poems, memorize the small parts. Slow your sentence down – take a day on a single phrase. Observe, judge, and strategize your performance: coach yourself. Learn to feel what optimum practice is, and sink into it every time.

            Your long term self image, how you imagine yourself in the end, determines your success more than anything: let this image become your eidolon, a symbol of your purpose.

            The unconscious can compute 11 million pieces of information per second, the conscious only 40 pieces: so practice continually to make it all second nature. Acquire that one powerful idea that moves everything else in your life, and tie it into your primal drives for survival, importance, and love.

            Even Whitman, a loafer who slept late, and was lax with his schedules, was “all urgency and strain when it came to his writings.” So you must economize your mental energy, herd it away even from duty, and let your slowly building reservoirs of stay energy by directed again to the same goals. Energy slowly builds until it is ready to burst, and we seldom get excited about what we expected to, but if we learn to reinterpret every novel excitement as a part of the same immortal goal, we will have maximized our effort towards it. The ability to interpret a book becomes again our greatest tool in structuring our own lives.

            It takes 10, 000 hours of deliberate practice to master an art: monomania wins the day. Learn to practice as effectively as possible.

 

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

 

what is a definition?

Definition

 

                Concepts grow from abstractions. The focus, or some automated engine habitualized from it, abstracts from memories some atom of experience from it, whether a sensation, or perhaps the feeling a given series of events feels like.

Once a lexicon of such abstracted words exists, imagine a concept, therefore, as a chain of micro-experiences, of the most basic sensual sort, that feel contextual-less. They feel like they are floating, though they are grounded in reality, and in this free-floating form, they may be bound together in abstract chains to create definitions of abstracts. A definition is a definited, deliniated, repeatable, exact experience. It by no means refers to anything but itself, and is immediately real. A definition is not a verbal formula as in a dictionary, but those are meant to give you the feeling of the definition. A definition as its name suggest is the most definite experience possible.

            When we hear a rule “When at time X do action Y” we must always first interpret it. Inter-pret:.to put ideas between the objects. We have image XY, but they are mere words, they are not direct experiences that apply again and again in the world. To understand the connection for all things like X and Y, we must put between X and Y a verbal sense.

X~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Y

and then put in substitutes

Q~~~~~~~~~~~~~~R

And then we may infer the sense or spirit of the rule:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

            Once this is known, all the variables that can be united by verbal conceptial “~~~” can be applied. After a rule is interpreted, and its sense felt, we no longer have to interpret anymore, we make a judgment to add it as habit, and do it automatically, blindlyl.

            All interpretation, analysis, and insight requires finding the hidden binding name between imaginable elements. It is a conscious process. If it is ever done unconsciously, that is possible because the interpreting itself has becone an unconsicous habit, but only after much deliberate practice. Nothing comes without willfull effort.

            A concept is abstracted from a sensual fact. The fact, a living experience, recorded as a memory, is abstracted, like a painting whose details are wetted out, leaving only a general shape, colored with an ethereal ambiguity that lets any detail needed fall in. When we think the word “dog” we think a sensual imagined thing. Not a specific dog, but something specific enough that any possible example of dog will be seen to be the same thing. For concepts are made of sensual experiences, and are sensual, but are reduced to simple forms, and combined with emotions. Since the entire mental language is made out of feelings and sensations, even the most abstract ideas are in fact imaginary, suggest a rudimentary geometry, and feel like a meaning, are felt to correspond to other ideas. Not only the bare words that we label them are sensual, but they are made of chopped and structured images, with a valence of meaning, a chain of abbreviation, by which we can feel the whole category it corresponds with. When we think the word dog, our full history of experience with this concept is recalled instantly under an abbreviation, a meaning that symbolized the whole.

            Ambiguity is also a positive experience. The feeling of a range of possibilities is definite and visceral.

            Meanings are concrete because they are definite and repeatable: either one experiences a meaning, or he experiences another. The sensual word we use to label a meaning can confuse us, and make us think that language is abstract, but we should say that spoken language can be ambiguous, whereas the language of pure thought is absolutely self congruent.

            In a precise language like mathematics, all numbers, even though abstract, are abstracted from sensual things, and still retain a sense, or feeling, of identity. Each number is symbolize not only by the name we use to handle it, but a physical relationship we’ve had with the number. This is not only true with addition and subtraction, which feel like something be added or taken away from our hands, but applies to even the most abstracted higher mathematical formula. These operations are based in gross bodily experience, and finally refined into precise operations. And executing an equation involves the tension of holding a goal, the effort of focus, the desire for a solution, curious, self doubt, perhaps a dozen periphery emotions, with a definite sense of finality when we feel we have solved it. All these emotions lend a mathematical operation a completely subjective and sensual experience which would assumably be lacking in the computer calculator seemingly performing the same operation.

            To think of a dog is to imagine for a second what it is to be a dog: we mirror everything we see, and take in its concept wholistically. From many various experiences of objects in a category, certain absolutes are drawn from each category, making a skeleton, and the variable parts are like a paint of grey were we can plug in any details.

 

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

 

part 3: Life is Narrative

 

Mental Vigour part 3: Life as narrative

 

 

Life as Narrative

                To enjoy art you must be willing to breath water. The fantastic world is another element, one must lose himself to it if he is to be taken in, otherwise, his eyes are critical like an alien’s eyes are critical: disliking because he knows not how to engage. But what he takes from art must be in turn dissolved into his own life.

            Lives are structured like narratives: the plot of the novel is the same stuff as the biography. The primordial plotline features a hero struggling for his goals. Every story resolves to this final spine. Ditto our lives. Since each man holds a limited amount of mental energy per lifetime, gaining or losing it, perhaps, by circumstance and the habits he forms, it follows that there must be a maximum use of his energy, which, when played against the chance of daily surprise, is best achieved through a general plotline. The basic plot of his life should be driven by a main overall purpose, to fuse his many goals and subordinate them. Like running a river through a woods, to water all life, yet not waste it in swamp and weeds, a tangible plan, like a staff through sand, must set the river in direction.

            We can focus on only a little at a time; therefore we ought to use symbols to fuse our goals into a purpose, for the symbol will make tangible the ethereal purpose. What we call a purpose for our lives is the name for what is important to it, and the highest name men have given for importance is “divine,” and “God” – indeed, the safest definition of God for theologians would be “the most important being.” Well as Allists, we take the All-form as the most important being, and take our lives to reflect the All: we aim to align our metaphysics and our biography.

            This is what the major religions have been up to from the beginning, this is how they market themselves: they sell a story about the big picture, a “metanarrative” or overall view, which the individuals participate with by following the ordinances of the religion. In this way, their lives borrow a relative importance insofar as they align them with the values of the religion. As all such “all-forms” “Gods” and “metanarratives” are fantastic, and apply to the imagination, the part of the mind that looks at what has not been experienced, the fantasy space, it could be well said that the greatest meanings of mankind are fantastic. We could not say they are illusory, since their purpose is to orient a life to fulfill its greatest needs – and this all religions have succeeded at. The theological poets have ruled the minds of man the longest, and their fables have swayed the public imagination even wider than art, which is too often elitist, noble, and proud, reducing its appeal to the intellectuals and the refined.

            A good story subordinates every new instance, so that once a man has chosen a style of consciousness, and a basic attitude towards obstacles, he is fated to live a certain sort of life. The greatest aspects of his story are the symbol he chooses for his purpose, and the attitudes he adopts to achieve this purpose. Note also that the conscious purpose of a man’s life is often only seeming so, and that the actual purposes of his actions speak better through the general outcomes of his adventures: we cannot cheat our feat for long, but gain what we secretly seek, whatever a crooked mouth may profess.

            Verbal consciousness, the habits that subordinate experiences into meanings, the grammar of thought, mature in adulthood into a definite style of speaking and writing. This style is based on some trick of perception, which, once guessed, would render the man completely predictable, if his style were not also self-conscious in the form of a personality, for a personality is a self-conscious style. The most effective way for it to be self-conscious, is to imagine how others view it, by watching them respond to it. In this way, a man avoids losing status and appeal through being predictable by subtly hiding his trick of style and instigating a brash of surprise often enough in to his talk to stun the careful analyst.

            And so this verbal self-consciousness we call the personality of the person, or the “me-myself,” should empower the will to narrate its own preemptive autobiography. We ought to plan our life into a story. In this way we will reinforce our habits into the power of a few meta-habits, and thus maximize our power. If all our goals and whims can be recruited into practice towards a greater mastery, we need not regret our daily caprice. We can subordinate the folly of daily life into the happiness of a life-long wisdom. Power holds pith in all life’s materials, we need only to digest it.

            Developing a personal mythology, featuring the general archetype of ourself, will orient us and place us in a greater scheme. And the more we do this according to private storylines rather than prefabricated roles in the world religions, the more our energy will work to glorify and empower ourselves, rather then the fantasies of others. Let each man be his own God.

 

Daniel Christopher June

 

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

 

 

Waiting again (revised)

Okay I ended up hating that poem. So I tried again.

 

Waiting Again

 

Where’s your word of explanation?

Tongue as jealous as death!

Holding back your last breath

Must I throw my arms in frustration?

Merely dreaming of you?

Warm as pulse, kiss like glue

Golden love from bee’s gestation.

 

Where’s your gift of loving respect?

I set down verbal cages

Pretty traps—please engage them!

Must I search your silvery aspect

But to glance a mere lance

Of moonlay by chance

And bottle the secret like an insect?

 

Where’s your return, to reclaim the stolen?

Your words dance in my hand

Like spit in a pan

Must I pretend that your silence is golden,

Your trace pains the prison

Like silent derision

Depth’s breath strives high for heaven’s devotion.

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

 

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