Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Section 4: Layers of Life

Greetings my fair greetings!

Well the first part of the essay is nearly finished. Before talking about the strategies for the game, I further complicate what I mean by my particular game of life, the philosophical metaphors I use. I use a layer metaphor to structure my ideas – perhaps you have sensed it in my writing? In this essay, I present my use of the metaphor as a template for how to use metaphors in general for comprehending the Game.!

 

Take care, Caretakers!

 

Daniel Christopher June

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. The Layer Metaphor

            Every writing introduces personalities, living characters, people embodied in anecdotes, allusions, and quotations. A character is a center of consciousness, a mind. If I were writing an essay, any allusion, quotation, or anecdote would introduce some mind other than my own. A writing is thick when it has many minds giving perspectives on the same idea. Every mind has its unique means of processing reality, of realizing it, of experiencing the world, first of all, and second of all, building truth from that. “Every mind is a new classification.” Each person has a few metaphors he uses to structure his experience. My own preferred method, my standard figure for ordering facts and information, is the use of layers. I feel as if I am winning my philosophical game when I can structure my experiences within a layer metaphor.

            In this, life itself is a layer of games, many that we play simultaneously: the game of making money, the game of love, the game of childrearing. And every individual game holds layers as well: the lower ones support the higher ones, the higher ones transcend from the lower, as when we play the game of chess, we want to win, yes, but we want to experiment and try new things, we want to socialize, we want to show off, we want to be respectful. In the game of love, there is the layer of outsmarting others, the layer of building them up, the layer of sex, the layer of love-making: they are all being played simultaneously, all layers at once, and every word and every action advances us differently on each level. Life is lived in layers, and we see them all from the surface.

            Read a book. All we can read is surfaces. The ego is a skin, and a book’s soul is in its face. If you know how to read, you can look into a book like a tunnel, and see meanings as deep as clear across the room. You can read between the lines at deeper lines, and read between those lines again. Below the surface of a writing are layers of meaning, different forms, in all sizes, that can yet only be seen through the surface, a surface that is everything.

            Every thing in the world and in the mind is so thick with forms that to distill a pure form, as in geometry, requires long attention on and attenuation of ideas. Some ideas are not visible in any one book, but require reading a hundred books before they can be unconsciously accepted. To then bring them to conscious knowledge would take much intense work: most of those ideas are unconscious to us all. We have them, they are in there, but too deep to bring to the surface. They are a deep layer, they support the higher things, but they are not known by them.

            Memory too is layered. Experience is a kind of memory that is happening right now. It is situated above our regular experience of life, the stereotypical memories, and that is above our life myth, the basic story we take as template for our life. Above and below live experience is the network of recent memories and future expectations that associate experiences into episodes, and situate us into time and history. Trauma digs into our generic expectations of life, makes a pit, a kind of wound, something that may never heal, but becomes a well, perhaps a well of pain, but as that well is cleaned and reinforced, the trauma can fill with healing waters. Approaching memories analytically and philosophically beautifies experience and trauma.

            If philosophy is a language of clarity, if philosophy is essentially the art of defining, in opposition to poetry as the art of suggesting, then the basic philosophical error, the basic mistake in thinking itself, is to misplace the boundaries around an idea.  The greatest philosophical problem is in establishing the identify of a thing: what is a thing, and what is it not? How can a thing be itself if it changes? How much of it can change before it is something else? Can I replace every piece of my car and still have the same car? The greatest moments of enlightenment flash across our brow when we realize where to properly set the borders between “yours and mine,” between “mind and body,” when we realize all the possible types of opposition within dualism, how they harmonize and clash – and ultimately how all these things are necessary and fit together into the necessary whole of the All. The layer model allows a thing to be itself and also more than itself. I am more than a man: I am part of that greater being called Man, which is a single mind over all the globe, of which each of us is a part. I personally am all of my possessions, and another layer of me extends into all of my influence.

            Knowing what is mine and what is not, what is in my control and what is not, what is in my power and what is not, what I should hope for and what is impossible, would let me channel my emotions into the correct outlets. The way oppositions are set up – pride versus humility, love versus hate – don’t add up, don’t properly balance this versus that. It is imagined that the drug addict in prison found Jesus and was saved from his addict lifestyle, when in fact, his addictions took on the Jesus-face as the latest flavor of servility. The wretched life becomes the pious life without changing its substance: it is all one thing, it could not be otherwise. The same moods, the some emotions, are restructured into a different overall gross shape, but the substance is the same. We must be careful when we say a thing is different from the next. Things that seem grossly different may be essentially the same.

            Nor does it do good to say “everything is everything” and “all is one.” All is one, in one sense, and not one, in another sense. My body is one, in a sense, and yet it is filled with organs, in another sense. I am all man in one sense; yet in another sense, for ever human cell in my body and yours, there are nine nonhuman cells (bacteria, viruses, fungus, and so forth). Everything is true, but only if we know how it is true, in relation to everything else we know to be true. Omniscience is knowing everything you need to know, and this comes from studying all we do know.

            Whenever there is an impasse between the natural two, a third appears, in the place of the supernatural. You want this, I want that, the third thing must come from above to justify each to each. The original nature, to get what it desires, must become the miraculous third, something to look down on itself. We will always need the fantastic to normalize the normal, so we can tell what is regular things and to be expected. We need fantasy, miracle, and mysticism – even though they are false categories! – to set the normal and regular into place. Some authority is needed, either an official authority or a fantastic authority The impossible allows the possible. From the surface layer, things appear coincidental. Axially, they are both coincidental and fatal. A man may be superstitious or otherwise pious, and yet do well at life. The monk is just as holy, if not more so, for the lack of a real external God, than if there were such a being.

            The ego is a skin. The body is the circumference of its influence. The full being of a man is the outer edge of the universe. I am a thin thread through her, and yet I stretch to the full extent she does. She contains me, as I don’t contain her, yet I am my own universe as well.

            Our possessions are, another layer, which must circulate and exercise like the blood and muscles. The inner layer of assumed concepts is my heavenly possession, in which nothing feels pained, but only joyed with certainty. Sophia Lux is heaven: language is bliss. Language is the true holy spirit, sentience and wise, broke into many forms, unified beneath them. I am in all I possess, in all my things and ideas, my spirit animates all of them. The language I breathed in during my infancy I keep for all eternity.

            Slip into the myth of it: The innermost of a man is the divine name of his personal needs. But that is not his name in the world. The name that stands for me, that let’s others summon my image and history with a mere breath, that is what survives me on this earth after I die, by which my spirit may be summoned. Or to escape the metaphysical language, my name is my social self, the speakable layer of my being.

            In the same way, an essay is held into place by its title. If only we were in the habit of naming vacations or weeks or favorite places, the way magical items are named in the Eddas, such as Odin’s spear of penetration, Gungnir. The title of a work is the highest surface, perhaps even higher than the author’s name. Below the surface are the layers of meaning, seen only by unfolding the thickness of the surface. The surface is everything.

            The present is everything. The past fully exists in the stuff of the present – in living records and physical traces. The future only exists in the womb of the present, the past in her stomach. The present is the center of existence the way you yourself are the center of the universe. We by no means experience a “pure present,” which would be of no use, but experience life contextually, as embedded in time, as coming after that and preceding this. We experience the present in many ways at many levels. We fantasize at every living moment, but it is beneath the skin, in a part of the brain where our ancestors lived their waking world as if in a dream. The extraordinary balances the ordinary, is the glimmer of the ordinary; the supernatural is the circumference of the natural. The supernatural therefore is the ego again, and the miraculous is that bit of nature which surprises the ego.  There is no fantastic except as ornament of the ordinary. Children have no patience for the ordinary, they prefer extremes. Christmas is about flying reindeer, not about meeting up with grandma. Adults also delight in the extraordinary, to reinforce the ordinary, as in breaking up the week by watching a cinema thriller. We prefer ordinary things.

            The layers support and challenge each other. We play many games at once, as life comes in layers. When there is a deadlock in one game, we escape to another. The solution to this problem at work may come from a poem. Nor do I always know when the answer has come. Perhaps I have answered a riddle but won’t know it for years. Life is layers. Translating energy between layers completes the circles. Some days in life are completely transfigured, and we realize that heaven is on earth, and that earth too is layered and rich.

            With layers, a thing may be organized, opposites may be unified, we may achieve Allism. With all religions balancing and correcting each other, as they already and always do, but now reflecting back on that interdependence, Allism is the crown of religions, the philosophy of philosophies, which does not reject anything, but threads all into all. It says ‘no’ to say ‘yes,’ it pushes down to raise up.

            The mirror is sacred to Allism, the reflection of all against all; it is the language that haloes the head of World Man. Let’s go back to Descartes. When he says “I think, therefore I am,” can we not also wonder, “Would you have equal existence if you never knew that you had existence?” The self-reflective thinking on his thinking may be his true being, but not the original thinking itself. “I think that I think that I am, therefore, I really am,” In other words, he came into existence when he thought about his thinking, but not when he thought about anything else. For there are orders of thinking. “Do I really exist?” is one order. “does the question ‘Do I exist?’ exist on own?” is another. Perhaps thinking may exist without a self, but self-reflexive thinking cannot exist without a self. Indeed, Epictetus regarded reason as “the best and most efficacious gift of the gods” because it was a faculty which could evaluate all others, and also unlike the others, it could analyze itself. And as Aristotle said, “only autonomy can be great,” for self-sufficiency is to round the circle of the self, to have no weak dependence on others. In this, reason and the self that uses the reason’s mind, make it the most laudable and beloved of man’s faculties. It is amazing that love, which is not autonomous at all, should also be praised as highly.

            With the layer model I win my game of comprehension, I am expanding by my standard, I am subsuming my experience. Other man and women would prefer each their own pet metaphor. What matters is that we each subordinate our life into truth, in accordance with a few controlling ideas. In this, not only do we understand reality, but we also comprehend it.

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

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Saturday, June 4, 2011

Life as game, part 1, section 2.

Life as game, part 1, section 2.

This section introduces the idea of the trifold braid in life. It explains that the taking life as a game is to abbreviate it from distractions. This is an extension and clarification of the first section. After the first five sections, the essay goes deep into the strategies I’ve found effective.

Take care, Caretakers!

Daniel Christopher June

=================================

 

Michelangelo - The Libyan Sibyl.JPG

 

2. The trifold Braid

            Life is what you make of it. And you can only make of life what you are able to make from it, from the ideas we have either internalized or invented. We train our eyes to look at shadows or sunflowers, we cock our ear for the music of the spheres or the groaning of the burn wards, always in accordance with our personal needs, as interpreted by our education, and in reference to our choices on how to interpret that education. I am what I was born to be, what I learned to be, what I chose to be. This trilogy cannot be abbreviated. We invent the concepts we need: all religions are true, all creeds correct, all answer to the basic needs, some better for you in your world, some better for me in mine. No society has lacked the sexual relationships, but each institutionalizes the family differently. Living in America I cannot comfortably attempt a polygamous life. My setup in life must take its forms from my environment. Each society offers a reasonable set of norms, and how we fit ourselves into them is through our individual style. There are a limited number of games out there, but as to how we play them there is no limit. To find our personal potential, we need only define life in such a way as to make style foremost.

            Life is a game. To structure our ideas with this assumption, we can set up our problems to be interesting and nonlethal. No longer is the axis of death so prominent, for life is to be played out, nothing too serious. With life as a game, we can prolong attention. At work, the attention we put on our tasks is held in place by a deeper layer of consciousness that focuses on starvation, homelessness, and divorce. The idea of suffering keeps us focused on our tasks, so though we may enjoy the work, its ultimate purpose is never too deeply buried in the layers of consciousness, but still guides and allows the enjoyment of work. Our needs, our most central and important aspect, are called “necessary,” from the word necros, death; we exist to live, and life can die. The ideas which guide our working life are painful, but we need seldom consider them: daily routine smoothes over life’s terrors, so that a man may be happy anywhere and at anytime, once he has internalized his environment, made it predictable, and thus mastered it and strategized how to fit himself best into it. Within the clay, a razor. Beneath placid water, the beast.

            The aim of the game is to play it well. The punishment for losing a game is merely knowing the fact that you lost it; the reward for winning is knowing the fact that you won. That is enough – we never tire of these punishments and rewards. The spirit of play is essential to the game; one enjoys doing well merely for the doing of it.

            We can only do something well if we can’t do other things at all. You can't be wise if you lie to yourself. You must choose your limitations. To make a choice, there needs to be no more than three options: one extreme, and two likely. The two likely options are the true dilemma, but to avoid a deadlock, the radical third is relevant. “Do I turn left, or right, or go back the way I came?” Constraints open and allow freedom. Limits open possibilities for mastery and tricks. A bird can fly only in relation to gravity; a man can walk only because the ground gives friction. Therefore, to make of life a game is to reduce life’s possibilities into something comprehensible: we know all the rules, and are no longer paralyzed by choice. I can do X, Y, or Z, and am free to choose them, but at least I can fully know the pluses and minuses of X, Y, and Z. If I had a full alphabet of choices, how could I exhaust the merits of each?

            I make only a few choices, do only a few things. My life is a braid of work, family, and writing. Nothing more. I may play the guitar, but that’s to write better; I may hang out with friends, but that’s to make me a better family member; I may take a vacation, but that’s to make work more enjoyable as I anticipate it before it happens and reminisce on it after its done. It's as if I were at the center of a circle, with my wife and children at one end, my work and duties at a second, and my writing at the third; and behind my wife and children, a group of friends, pushing my family in, and behind my work station, my possessions pushing my work into me; and behind my notebooks and laptop, the very universe and the Mother holding open her palms as if they were the books I were writing upon. Or with a different image, work and family are the supports of my writing, like the bottom corners of a triangle: I work so that I can keep my family, and I keep my family so I can write. The writing in turn is an apparatus built over my heart that through theory and recommendation helps me be a better worker and family member, by guiding all my emotions into their appropriate emotional outlets. I am as proud of them all as if they were a choice, and as certain of them as if they were not.

            We all need such a braid, to make a living, to have a family, to have a passion. While one may speak of being “passionate” about his family or his job, the word doesn’t quite fit: a job must be stable, a family must be secure. A passionate romance is not the appropriate material for building a family, and passionate enthusiasm disrupts work, as work requires continual stable input, not creative outbursts nor the hysterics of genius.

            With life as game, these three interbraid and complicate each other. With life (emotions), the world (people), and the universe (all things) as wholes beyond our daily doings, a worldview can yet select the metaphors that fit them into place, which figure out what our world is like, what our life is about, as one of the purposes of our life, one of the things we need to do. Some people fall into depression over the challenges the world brings against their worldview: William James grew depressed over what science had to say about free will. Or maybe he let such things justify his depressions, which he would have had anyway. Whatever the case, distancing oneself from the imagined danger of having the wrong ideas in our head, such as the evil idea that we deserve hell if we believe the wrong things, is possible when we take our worldview as also a sort of game, characterized by playful experimentation and carefree invention. If this is true, then seriousness, even deadly seriousness, is a move in the game, something we can try, and if we want, drop again. We can choose between a few experiences and say “that’s what life is about!” A little synecdoche, and you’ve got an essence to work with. Choose something that will keep you focused and happy for a long time. Life is a series of needs that can be met in many ways, and the metaneed is to strategize more effective ways to fulfill our other needs. “As I walk, I think of a new way to walk” – indeed, everything in life can be done masterfully, if we learn how. And what is best for me can be taught to me by nobody but myself. That is why my religion is writing.

            Religions are big games, best-sellers. All religions are an image of the truth, for they evolved as projections of needs. Whatever absurdity they preach, those believers were somehow fulfilled by them, and knowing how and why they were is itself a universal truth, and one that boots well in scripting a better religion.

            Is not our own religion both vindictive and accepting of all other religions? Isn’t our true religion in our passionate creativity? Life is short? Art is long? Very well, choose your lifelong art project, and let jobs and friendships add what they can to that, before they fall away like autumn leaves.  Make life-goals, decade long projects: script out what each decade of your life is for, and how it fits within your larger goal. Our game in life is to play all other games to our own style. The best game is self-publishing, is the diffusion of our spirit into a myriad of life’s forms. It is as if we carved out our flesh into the playing tools we use, or breathed an endless breath of life into every clay bird of life’s details. The development of style is the hidden aim of each game. Hiders are the best finders: the more we efface our intentions through a smirking humility, the more we see through the humility of others. We experience their hidden meanings, and take them in and understand what they stand for. So too do we know who is playing life, and who is merely surviving it. We experience the joy of life. Our world enlarges by what we experience, what we allow ourselves to experience, what we attempt. Attempt the most and you will achieve the most.

            Nothing is beyond life that can be thought--even the widest realities can it be represented – life itself understands the limits of life, for metaphors are representative, as if a thread emerged from each metaphorical knot and spread out into all things, which themselves are free and independent. Life is what we make of it, it grows from the constitution of our theories. Style grows from speculation. And style is the expression of self. Self-expression is the game of life, to integrate the layers of my being with the layers of the world, a full concordance, a braid of integrity. Our potential is in a higher integration and more thorough maturity.

 

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

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Thursday, June 2, 2011

"Strategies for the Game, Part 1, Section 1" an essay

Greetings fair greeters!

As I may have mentioned, I’ve been working on this essay about how to win at life for a few months. Its mushroomed to become over 120 pages. I will share it with you section by section over the next month. The essay is exciting for me, I’ve put countless hours into it. It explores the metaphor of life as game, and serves as a sort of constitution for structuring my own life. Every sentence is an artery into my daily actions.

Take care, Caretakers!

 

The essay is structured around the 8 virtues, after this first part of life being a game, of which this is the first section.

 

Daniel Christopher June

 

 

PART 3: VIRTUES AND THE ALL

Strategies for the Game

 

Life as Game

1.

            The most important things in life are beyond life; they exceed direct experience. Life, Love, the World, and the Universe are concepts we refer to everyday, yet who has experienced all of life? Who has understood the full of love? who has seen the whole of the world? who knows the being of the entire universe? We experience the world because we need to, and we experience it how we need to; those important things that can't be experienced directly by us, by the angels, by the gods, but only by the Universe herself, we nevertheless do experience as concepts: a tight set of metaphors will tell each of us what the universe is like, what life is like, what love is like, what the world is like. Life is a game, life is a journey, life is a test, life is suffering, life is a blessing – all these are confluences into one reality. I can comprehend them into tight summaries, these concepts. Life is the sum of my activities on earth; love is the sum of my desires and pleasures, the world the sum of people I interact with; the universe the sum of all things; yet my mind is a narrow faucet, how can I understand the full extend of these ideas when  I can only toggle four ideas in the center of my focus at a time? To capture the full picture, to bite the entire world as if it were an apple, to see my whole life flashing before my eyes, I require a wise use of synecdoche, to take one aspect of the universe  as the whole and tell her: “Mother, this is your essence! This is natural for you, this is what you are all about.” It doesn't matter to her what I think her essence is as much as it matters to me, for in choosing an essence for the universe, for the world of people, for the loves I seek, for my own private life, I change my experience of these things. All ideas are stretches of the lens of the mind's I, so that the mirror of mind warps and curves to recreate all my experience in the light of a few controlling ideas. Ideas are everything: philosophy makes the world. The true gods are philosophers, they are the wise fingertips of Mother Universe, and tap out the laws and rules of the All on the keyboard of Being. Our greatest possessions are a few bright ideas.

            So we must project part of the universe as the heart of the all. The universe is like a mother: that will help us, and through our image of her, she will speak to us. Very well. And the world is like a playing field. And life? What is life? Life is a game? How far will such a metaphor take us? What if life is a game? What does that mean? How will assuming such a thing enhance our life? For there are many among us who look at life as education: we are here to learn lessons; suffering is a lesson. Isn't that a more sober and serious manner of taking life than as a frivolous play of children? Didn't even Socrates look at life as a sort of disease in need of a cure?

            Let us recall our founding myth. In the beginning I was All. My Mind and my Needs were unified, and I therefore didn't exist, didn't live. But then the freedom of mind escaped the bliss of necessity, and I came to life, to suffer and enjoy, to grow and improve, to increase my being. At whatever time and place that break occurred, it also happened also at the exact moment of my conception, and as that was the resonate place for me to be, wherever and whatever I was before that moment, I was also there. This is our metaphysical fable. The highest virtue of a metaphysics is that it is non-falsifiable. It explains all the falsifiable bits of science, but itself is so cleverly articulated as to warrant complete faith. It cannot be doubted because it isn't real; not real, but necessary. Some truths are necessary and yet can never be proved. That we need them is all the proof we require, and that they cannot be proved or disproved makes them uniquely valuable.

            And so life is the sort of existence where I am to grow and improve, and this through creating that very life. This is straightforward enough. And so life is a created thing. To sustain the creating of life, the creating of soul -- the "self-increasing logos" -- to keep my focus on these goals, I play life as a game. For a game is goal-focused play. As play, it keeps my focus, sustains it longest, engages heavy matters in a light spirit. Nothing succeeds without a little prankishness. The true divine wears a sarcastic smile. This is better than working life. Work is the anxious business of staying alive, "making a living," whereas play has no serious consequence, and so lacks real anxiety. Instead, with games, one seeks rank, the sheer joy of winning, of playing best, of being best in something which doesn't really matter. Surely we can take life this way, but against whom do we compete?? how do we win? These things need not be defined as part of the same game.

            Nor do we need to be every at play. Life as game doesn't mean life is only a game, or that we should always use that metaphor. The full truth of the universe, the self, love, life, and the world are beyond simple formulations. They are complex. We ought to use a metaphor so long as it is useful, and set it back on the shelf when it’s not.

            Life is a game if we make it into one. By projecting a playing space over the world, by defining and enforcing the rules we will play by, by establishing and maintaining competition, we will have made the Game. Winning is the object of every game, and yet a game can be fun even if we merely seek, yet fail, to win. The force of will against will, the dialogue between will and cunning, make the game forever fascinating, and being fascinated, we can focus on it for long periods of time. Focus is a sort of mouth that must open to eat. When we can focus for long times, we can then internalize long experiences, without which we would lack certain ideas, lack certain truths, and would lack the philosophical tools to play the game more effectively, to better fulfill ourselves, to make more of a soul for ourselves, to win the game and pass on to become gods. So we prolong attention. We attenuate our efforts. Games are fun because they involve chosen risk. We control the danger. We seek rank for the mere need for importance, just as we seek solidarity for the mere need for love. With work, we change the pain of focus into money, as if by alchemical conversion, but with games, the pay for focus is in the joy of sustain. Yes, we grow by it, but that is not the payment: focus feeds itself. We seek rank and intimacy, power and love, admiration and adoration, distance and touch. For both love and power crave regard. Attention of some sort is our social need: we wish at last for our soul to be contemplated. Best to focus on our few basic needs. By simplifying such goals into a game, we can cut the clutter from our playing field. Best to focus on our few basic needs. By simplifying such goals into a game, we can cut the clutter from our playing field.

            Within a game, the world is abridged into a playing field, reduced and therefore made easier to comprehend. To internalize a world and a setting allows us to play with it, to control it without anxiety. What fun we could have if we could make an exact copy of today's world, return to it as often as we wanted in virtual reality, and try out possibilities, so long as that world and its consequences could be reset whenever we desired. Give a man enough time in such a place, and perhaps he would try every possibility, become a criminal in turn, a saint or ruler in turn, to discover just how wide his arms could stretch.

            Life also is a bit like that. We find ourselves in the same sorts of situations and we attempt to master them. One can work well, or game well, if he plays constantly. The razor-tongued woman always has a sharp come-back because she is always thinking nasty thoughts. She doesn't let them come out as cruelty, but as sly wit. In that way she wins. She sets up the game of her life, to be a series of challenges which she wins or loses based on how quickly she comes up with a witty retort. She wins when even her target has to laugh and blush at her wit, and thus be unable to complain of her cruelty.

            And so life can be viewed as a braid: we have our family, our work, and our passion. My eternal braid is between the job that taxes me, the family that challenges me, and the writing that redeems everything. Yet in and through all these things, the spirit of play is the substrate, the ether, the ambience. I can do all those things as a game, even my work, even my family duties. And so the game of life is something beyond the work, the family, so that the passion of life, a way of approaching them. The game aspect is a lens I wear.

            The forms we look upon most become the lenses for other forms. If I am a doctor, and doctor my patients from day to night, I begin to see my entire life as made up of  patients with symptoms. What is literal and direct for work becomes figurative and allegorical for the rest of my life. Thus the braids of life become types, and finally typesets for each other, until the ideas of life so intermingle that we have the same basic tools for all things, the same meta-tools for thinking, feeling, talking, and acting, so that the particulars of the day to day become the playing pieces of the Game.

            The object of the game of life, the first step for each of us, is to determine our own goals, our own rules, our own morality. This is both universal and relative: we each must come up with something, but it need not be, cannot be the same something. Emerson never felt he was making the best use of his time; this very anxiety was a game ploy to bolster his performance. The impossible ideal he set for himself, like all ideas, had a cost and a payoff, it absorbed certain emotions and it fed out others. All ideas eat certain emotions and exude others. Everything has a cost, everything pays a gain.

            The forms that occupy our concern shape that concern, shape our focus. After reading Walt Whitman all day, your inner ear is shaped like a Whitman poem; now pick up Dickenson, and she is a different woman than if you had spent the day dancing instead of reading. It is like drinking orange juice after brushing your teeth: what you experienced first changes what you experienced next. After serving customers for long hours at the cash register, how often I dream the same, dream on the anxieties and boredoms of the job, I toss and turn in my bed, imagining I am really at work, when I finally stir enough to murmur, "I'm not being paid for this, so let's dream of something fun!" Yet we can take the work environment as confluence into home life. Let every experience bleed into the others. Most of life is in the middle.

            If experience happens in the middle layer of memories -- not so deep down as the layer of the mythic structurer of memories, and not to high up as the layer of processed and structured memory -- then live experience is as passing as autumn breath. Our experience is couched between our story of ourselves and our concepts about the world. If my experience is traumatic, it would sink into my deep layers like the poison of a serpent; if it were memorable, the assumptions would bind that memory up like a fly in a spider web, until it was unable to squirm away, and give sip to my philosophical thirst. Only slowly and rarely do specific experiences become memories, and from memories, controlling concepts, and from concepts, guiding habits, and from habits, finally, as we pass on to our next form, into final changes of the will and needs themselves. The assumption of ideas is integral.

            The assumptions make a world of pure forms, a heaven whose god is Lux Sophia, goddess of language. These forms are abstracted and held together by desire. So the most transparent and abstracted of ideas is a sensation bent and attenuated till it is a pure glass lens, charged with desire so that it moves in relation to the center of focus. What we assume, we use to see. The game is played by developing the best forms, the best ideas, and applying them again to life as strategies, both for gaining more experiences, yet again, and for gaining more forms. We take ideas out of life, perfect them, and put them back into life again. It is like earning money so that you can use it to earn more money.

            All the forms we learn clarify the forms we need. Life, love, the world, and the universe are necessary concepts which we must assume in order to live well: the overall structure of them is a philosophy, and the application of them is a game. The game of life is to live well, to play with ideas, to experiment, to enjoy what the world has to offer, and to avoid worries that do not also enrich us. In everything we attempt to win; and if we lose, that is a necessary step of winning. The game of life is to take our concepts of life, love, the world, and the universe, and play them out. What does it matter if my metaphysics, my religion, my ideas are objective or not? If they enhance my play, I keep them.

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

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Monday, May 16, 2011

experimental sentence.

Your opinion please, on this experimental sentence I’ve made.

Daniel

==============

 

The strong being is the proof of the race and the ability of the universe, the strong mind the same, for society is a troop of thinkers, and the best heads among them take the best places, knowing that the noble soul has reverence for himself, and inspires awe through awful eyes, saying with a glance, “when you see the one not born of woman, fall upon your faces and prostrate yourself before that one, for that one is your father,” inspiring honor in the honorable, for artful and enthusiastic reverence and devotion are regular symptoms of an aristocratic way of thinking and evaluating; they take the best places knowing that nothing is at last sacred except the integrity of your own mind, so reflect upon yourself, and when you ask what is right your bosom will burn within you and you shall feel that it is right, for there is light within the man of light, and that one enlightens the world, bringing greater light and greater shadows, because all kinds of power usually emerge at the same time; good energy and bad; power of mind and physical health; they take the best places knowing that if anything is sacred, the human body is sacred, which is why even I weaken your will to bronze your bones, till we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor—so do not dissemble in front of me, for here we are equal, and I will wash over your soul, mind, and body, for my greatness is like water, which benefits the world without fuss, and when you share liquid speech, you share me, for between three divine beings, there is God, where there is one or two, I am with that one, I, who has the idea of All and am All and believe in All.

 

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

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Sunday, May 15, 2011

"the dragon and the unicorn" a poem

A little verbal nothing I wrote for my amusement.

Daniel Christopher June

 

The Dragon and the Unicorn

 

I the wise dragon

Last of my kind

And you,

pure horned unicorn

questing the world,

lonely confused,

you dare glare

down my lair

Desperate in quest

Willing to face

The only enemy

A unicorn knows:

Immortal before immortal

Each the only bane the other.

 

How you hated my flamed breath

How your glowing innocence

Pierced the philosophy of my nest

As if us ancient serpents

had stripped you of your race,

as if I myself had death ensnared

your loves and mothers.

 

We are both alone here,

I am the last of mine

You are the last of yours

I hadn’t guess there could even be a you.

Hadn’t known you were possible.

The others passed on to the other place

I do not know when or how

Their fire no longer resonates to mine

I will neither bite wit into you

nor breath fury over you

I leave you to your peace

Let our ancient war be ended in this place.

 

That innocent one came to love me then

Immortal yet naïve

And though I knew better

I loved her too

And we were inseparable lovers

Conspirers over this world and its ways

And what I had came to burn in her

And what she had came to burn in me

And we never forsook each other

Nor grew tired of our company.

 

Yet eon past eon,

the earth had grown so old

she was young again

and even in our love

we had grown weary of life.

I bore my heart to her,

in all its intimacy,

She shuddered and obeyed,

She pierced my heart

with perfect horn,

Alone the foe to me,

And my blood the same to her

Shorn upon her fleece

We died in union, child to age

Innocence is wise.

 

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

tweetpic

 

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

"alone today" a song

I wrote and recorded this song today to capture the mood I am in.

 

http://www.msu.edu/~junedan/alonetoday.mp3

 

Daniel

 

 

 

 

 

~~

Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

~~

tweetpic

 

Thursday, March 17, 2011

"To fall in love is to resonate to a style" an essay

Greetings friends. I am reconciled with my wife, moved back home, and love her more than my own life. I’ve been doing well at my job – it was iffy for a while! – and over all life is beautiful once again. I’ve been working on this essay intently for a  week, and can no longer stand to look at it. The theme is that we must read life and realize that style resonance is the basis of finding our place in the world. As usually, my ideas are all over the place – this is the allistic style – but I try to subordinate them to the key them. I will return to this essay in four months for the next draft, so your feedback is helpful

 

Take care, Caretakers!

 

Daniel Christopher June

 

 

To Fall in Love is to Resonate to a Style
 
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                I cannot engage an author whose style and tone do not resonate with me. An author who is my own I recognize immediately – the same with people. Nietzsche I can read forever, always gaining more, feeding on him as if it were leaves fallen from my own limbs. Emerson and Whitman are the same. Deleuze I could not get three feet into without feeling sick. The style interrupts itself nonstop, in the French postmodern style, so thick and congested with allusions and quotations that within seconds my head is spinning and ears clamoring. I can’t read a sentence of William Gass without disgust. Yet anything written in the American Renaissance breathes well with me. Its all in the touch of the clause, the assonance of vowels, and the smile on the author’s face. A style shows me my own. The soul beneath the words chose them and gives them to me like a Valentine.

                Style is emanation of the innermost. Those born from the same spark as us resonate to us, style to style. Every man is like a god, each who has some bird, plant, or animal sacred to him – “the eagle, which is sacred to Zeus” – so that we find from our innermost name the corresponding analogies in nature. The unique shape of our soul requires an external system to fully express and fulfill it: we seek a circle of friends, but a circle of a certain shape and orbit, perhaps bent a little this way, perhaps bent a little that. The soul finds its shape scattered here and there throughout history, as if a trickster god had reached into his heart at the beginning of time, and scattered diamonds of his soul throughout the mix of things. Sometimes, it takes decades to fall in love, to let an idea sink deep into the soul and permeate the soul. The soul must want it deep down. Then the tempo is within our heart. We can only fall in love with our own. The strange becomes beauty, once we know how to see.

                Style is easiest to see within an epitome. We all come to epitomize our soul first of all in some symbol, some gesture, some mannerism or nickname, to stand for the general tendency, and second of all, in some crowning story, which evokes and overcomes that general tendency. “Every dog has its day.” We each shine best through some event we couldn’t predict, which retroactively defines us. The tiny circle of the soul, if blown as wide as the solar system, would show a thread as nuanced as a key, and thickly rich. We can best fulfill our nuanced need when our desires are intellectualized, exploded, and personally touched. There is the stereotypical me, the abbreviated, easily mocked, easily gossiped, easily exchanged type of me, that is currency among friends and acquaintances – and here a nickname will do. And then there is the apotheosis of me, as I engage that nickname, both justifying and overcoming it, my self-overcoming. In other words, there is Daniel normal and Daniel exceptional, and both refer back to the self-same inner being. Only a best friend would have the fine taste to know my subtleties; for the rest, knowing these two will do.

                An epitome is like a character sketch: confusing data is graphically simplified. Likewise, the language of science is math, logic, geometry. Any set of data can be graphed in a coherent manner. Chaos theory is based on simplifying data sets: there never was any chaos to begin with. Let the universe speak in my language, and I will listen. Speak to my needs, and you interest me. The epitome graphs my complexity into the perfect gesture.

                Our epitome is present in every breath. Style is a matter of breath. The mind breaths. The focus of I breathes in sentences; each sentence or fragment of thought resembles wind floating images; each is syntactically chopped into breaths. We can only think for so long before we must stop and breath. And we can only stay on one topic before we can’t learn any more. You cannot study chemistry dawn to dusk, for the topic will exhaust our interest. Interest is like a field of fluid, like a glimmering fog of white, that doubles what we focus upon; when it is gone, we lack the energy to handle such things. Every friendship needs a vacation; every object needs a break. We think together if we breath together. As thought is deeper than talk, it takes longer to think with a friend than it does to talk with him.

                The breath of focus is our style of thinking. It is the music of thought. Music itself is the objectified form of emotion, and our emotions structure themselves like a kind of symphony. The breath of focus is our fundamental style; it metaphorically embodies our values, those ordered feelings of importance, so that when we hear a person talk, we immediately know if he is of our own. When we read a writing, the words brush by like air, but slowly they get the water moving. Every word has emotional resonance, and slowly we are feeling the tone and attitude of the author. This attitude presents his ultimate values; if they resonate to ours, we will love him; if they don’t, we won’t. We can tell merely by how long his clauses are, by how he stacks them – how many, and in what order, with what contrast – we can sense his soul, for every part of him exudes the shape of the whole. Attitude is a filter. The world is too thick: we must use our attitude as a sort of engine of thought that only allows certain objects to become conscious.

                The world intensifies to our appraisal. Our friends slowly confirm our suspicions, they become more and more stereotyped, until we have divine a secret habit of their thinking; then they are caught. We can now bring that person to his crisis, by confronting him with his own automatic habit, his nickname, his casual gesture, and forcing his mind to react to it. If my friend habitually lies regarding her past, I can confront her with that past. Like wind over water, I pull from the lake a river, I open a path to the sea. I know her heart by how she talks, but her mind by her eyes.

                Intelligence resides only in mental endurance. How long can an intense focus last? Sometimes I can say the right words to the right person and I see her life forever changed. So much preparation went into those words: my whole life went into them. I fed her my soul. It takes decades to understand a simple idea, and though I might hear a cliché a thousand times, a proverb becomes providential when it dawns personally on me. Pain requires much interpretation to symbolize. We can cope with any problem once we have appreciated its parameters, are no longer surprised by it, know what to expect, and can thus abbreviate it into a rational story. It must fit our life story, be part of it, feed the same river, the same great Uroborus.

                Pain invades us; trauma forces energy into deep layers. This must be processed. We can only formulate what we can control. And once it can be said, it can be done, overcome, handled, defeated. Energy from our needs emerges within different layers. When the time is ripe, that energy emerges and demands full focus. We can only focus for a while, the god is on for a bit, intensity times duration, before we must rest again and turn our energy to another organ. Only what I haven’t done in months can I do with enthusiasm. This is why all great artists are continually creating, working on many things at once, many related projects, capturing every tone and mode of inspiration. And yet I must relax from my art and fall into the arms of love.

                The deep layers require personal touch. We need intimacy, as we need love. Love is the pleasure of intimacy. The inner spheres of our heart must be touched to release and receive energy. Lacking an ability to touch heart to heart, hand to hand, eye to eye, mouth to mouth, genital to genital, hope to hope – always like to like – we would resort to trauma to get our intimate needs touched. Would we have criminals if they knew how to lover?

                We do what we care about. Caring is enjoying intimacy, to focus on and personally touch. Will against will is the nature of competition, and so fighters and warriors are intimate. Care is about emotional investment. Philosophers must humbly give their philosophy to philosophers, and speak in riddles to the rest: a great poet writes only for poets, and leaves the hacks to write for the masses. Narcissus could not be tricked by an audio reflection, he wanted eye for eye and gaze for gaze.

                When the inner layers swell with energy and wish to express themselves, we unconsciously arrange an intimate encounter, we prepare to engage a touch. This is falling in love, or dallying a flirtation, or initiating a friendship, or discovering a new favorite author, or playing a new fad, or whatever else.

                Ultimately, when we need intimacy, we speak intimately. Words convey emotions, and we internalize and externalize emotions all the time, as the social energy, the stuff of life. It is as if reveres of different colors poured out from us and into others. For every person in our life, we pour some emotion, if not through our words to him. at least into our image of him, which finds voice whenever we talk about that person. Every word others say has an emotional resonance, which means something personal to us. Strong styles influence us. If one coworker is insistent upon exactitude at work, everybody else starts paying attention to the rules, at first ironically, then naturally.

                We are each to the world a style incarnate. Style is personal, it is the personality made tangible. The personality is the sum of our communication habits, just as our reason is the sum of our thinking habits, our attitude the sum of our feeling habits, and our character the sum of our acting habits. Since attitude is a filter, we each do not see the world as others do. Our memories are formed from  mental snapshots, some of them invented after the fact, as many people remember their childhood in the third person, watching themselves as if in a movie. Our mental snapshots represent the world to us, and thus we make reality by how we structure our memories. There is style in how we remember.

                There are two extremes in the way we talk: A good literary style is either toothy or tonguey. A tooth style chops ideas finely, and says things not beautifully but exactly. A legal contract is toothy. A poem speaks with the tongue: any word can be used to talk about my desire, so long as it sounds beautiful where I place it. The tongue is the organ of desire, of consumption and expression. The tongue is a fire, and language is lust. We speak in order to make others desire what we desire.

                Eating the styles of the world requires both tooth and tongue. Fine taste is knowing the words and terms necessary to appreciate small distinctions, having teeth. Perception requires conceptualization to capture nuance. We could listen to Beethoven all year, but not knowing the specific musical terms, we would fail to speak meaningfully of the patterns in his symphonies. Having the terms, we can listen to the music and get much more out of it. Knowing the systems and terms, we build expectations of the genre, and are able to set Beethoven within it. We come to see that each of his symphonies is a being in itself, that his complete work is a being in itself, that the world of his contemporaries is a being in itself, the complete genre of music is a being in itself – and all these compound as the spheres of being, as layers of consciousness. It takes good taste to see something in terms both of its own being and also its context. Good taste is also within its own context, since the taste still belongs to a being with needs, living within history. This is how it should be, because this is how it must be.

                Good taste means being harder to impress, but when impressed, experiencing greater pleasure. Each of us is hyper-sensitive to only a few things. And what we taste with greatest nuance, there we are both picky and open to ecstasy.

                To build good taste, to build a personal style which acquires taste in order to sustain itself – and feeding our own creative expression is the best justification for enjoying art in the first place – it requires a continual expenditure. Good taste consumes much energy. Time is limited. There are only so many hours in the day. I could exercise, I could cook, I could read all sorts of books, learn all sorts of instruments, volunteer my time, go to church, attend symphonies, see concerts – there is no end to what I could to, and its all nonsense. What I must do matters. What I must do I do because I have certain needs, and those needs require expression.

                Bursts of energy come to the surface of consciousness unexpectedly: I never know where I will find inspiration. I suddenly find myself eating this food, befriending that person, reading such and such a book, and I attack these things with such passion that each of them feels most necessary, feels as if for the moment, this man, this book, this drink is the full world, and my sacred duty is only to fully indulge this one thing. That is the secret of my genius. To love one thing with my full strength when I am ripe for love: of that I am never ashamed. My projects come to me with a certain unpredictable fascination. They silence all other interests, and I enjoy them with the full tenor of my passion. My entire style of energy is passionate. My energy builds like sex, bursts like an orgasm, and rests like success.

                Style is based on breath and circulation – tempo. Our style is more in what we do than in what we wish we did. Philosophizing requires an excessive mental energy, which would otherwise be spent in business and love. Let a friend complain that he wishes he had more time to learn the guitar. I wonder if he means it. He may plan on starting lessons as soon as he gets his promotion. Yet whether he gets it or not, I think he won’t start the lessons. We each make time for what is important to us. If we want to do something, we would do it. And the karma of our desire is that we always get what we want. Whatever we think we want, our actions show what we really want, and we never fail to get it.

                To use the old distinction, not quite coherent, not quite convincing, between drive and desire, a drive is the expression of life—what we need; and desire the basis for mind –what we want. My drives are like Uroburos, the tail biting serpent, the river that comes full circle. My beginning and end are in writing. I write better to improve my life, and live a better life to improve my writing. As cycling productivity is a central virtue to me, I find it necessary to ever return over the same old ground, to cycle through my documents, through my writing, through my possessions, editing them constantly. What clothes don’t I need to own, what books, what letters? I seek to carve away all distractions, all clutter. A great circular river runs through my life, and will continue to cut into history long after I die. For it lives within my writing, and my writing is my immortality in this world. The key to life, the purpose of life, the meaning of life, is to create the perpetual goal, the Uroborus, the continually intensifying drive of constant engagement. Writing this book is my Uroborus. I spend decades on it, I am never finished.

                How long can an intense focus last? As meaningfulness is a slowed down and pronounced breath of focus, so the most meaningful moments come from intense focus. This cannot be sustained. And even when it can be prolonged, it can’t be on the same object. William James said we could only focus for a matter of seconds on one thing, and this is true even for adept meditators. The brain consumes most of our blood, the mind consumes most of our energy. Yet it is lazy and wants vacations. All friendship wants spaces and vacations, even marriages wants token departures and fake divorces, to maintain and sustain the intimacy. Intimacy is the shortest touch, and yet it is worth all the coldness and distance, and even requires much coldness and distance.

                Intimacy requires engagement. Engagement is a mirroring of language, a coupling of attitudes, a doubling of beliefs – “what I assume you shall assume!” We can only engage our lover for a moment, and must turn away again lest our heart cover itself in shame from too much touch.

                Every relationship requires more than love of style. Love is never enough. If love is the core of our marriage, the skin and muscle of it must be the contractual aspect of two people sharing responsibilities, filling traditional roles, divvying up chores, working together, talking constantly. Commitment is the ripeness of romance. To commit to a lover, to solidify the emotional intimacy with the intractable promise of duty, requires a mature self-respect, as one capable and willing to hold to a promise,; as one, therefore, who deserves love in the first place. It isn’t even love until it is more than love. Yet as sharing a secret initiates the friendship, as sharing a guilt inaugurates the love, as sharing a privacy is the basis of all deep relationships, the duty is hollow without the internal core of love. Duty protects the heart. Intimacy is all important, and yet intermittent. The shared shame of lovers is their greatest pride –shame is the cloak of pride! – for lovers boast endlessly of their love, and protect it jealously, ruthlessly, and immorally, as they should. The primacy of the we-form, of “us the couple,” this is the breathing of a shared style, a new being, a group identity. Style is a manner of breathing. Lovers breathe together, conspire together, they are ever enemies of the public, and thus the public needs them.

                Intimacy requires engagement, conversation. Almost all conversation, no matter how practical, is really about establishing attitudes. Each tone of voice resonates to some inner layer of my heart, so that intimacy is possible only if you can speak it, if you can sustain that tone when my defenses go up. Nothing can approach me which is not already part of me. Do you speak to me of God or the All? Well I adore the All. Yet the worldview of the all is merely one more view among many. So she is omniscient, what is that to me? I see things as I need to see them, as I choose to see them, and that is good for me. Wondering what Eternity thinks would be pure projection on my part. Even if she told me herself, I would be under no compulsion to concur, because I am my own universe.

                We each need a metaphysical myth about our place in the universe. A fantasy is a story the needs tell us. It represents both what we want, and what we think others want of us: it aims to unify us with the whole. Fantasies are social, not selfish. Possibilities make for the hottest fantasies. If I never intended to date let alone meet my favorite female singer, I am still a little sad when she marries, as if a door had closed for me. Fantasy and art serve similar functions, for beauty is the symbol of value, is the pleasing face we put over the pleasing thing. All gaps and inconsistencies in the world are really in our way of looking at the world, science and intelligence is never complete. The mind alone has gaps; the mind alone needs fill them: and for this we need art. Fantasy ensures that the emotions circulate.

                Friendship means mirroring the best in those we love. It requires great sympathy to know how to mirror a man’s soul back to him. Polite gestures are one thing, and we can all talk about the weather. But to know his soul intuitively, to say the very same words to this man as we did with that one, and yet with this one, with our tones, pauses, and gestures, reflecting his soul back on itself, so he becomes more himself, so he reveals his intimate parts, so his internal circle expands to make his nuances tangible, this requires mental acumen.  Behind all sanity, each man is mad; behind his normalcy, he is peculiar. We structure our madness to fit in with the everyday. We want to be paid for our abnormalities. When we sniff each other out, to our own we say  “no one had to tell us these truths. Twenty years of sitting tried to take them from us. The innocence I keep protected in my madness resonates when you are near, as if I remember a far away perfection. Who are you? Perhaps a bit of song reminds me the same. I call you elusive. Only in the innocence of sickness am I able to be fully honest to you for then I lack all shame. Was not the shame of nakedness called evil?”

                We are friends and mirror beauty to beauty. How do we mirror the innermost? The unconscious mirrors what you hope to find in it. If chakras, then chakras, if Atman, then atman, if Id, then Id. It is a clever demon, taking the shape of what we expect. It knows how to make us believe that this strange thing is normal and to be expected. Consider our dreams. We don’t feel surprised, no matter how bizarre they are, but  marvel only in the morning when we grope to remember them.

                Perhaps the essence of my strangeness will be one day distilled. I seek to say amidst these thousands of pages only a few of the ever same things. Perhaps each man should be viewed by his mythic fantasy. Mine is to deify myself, and leave this scripture for my lovers, who are of my same soul. This book is my body. We each have a key fantasy. Zizek identifies the Lacanian analyst’s fantasy – and Zizek’s as well – to show how “the undeniable fact that a person is in love can be denied and taken from him through analysis,” the desire to eat the patient’s desain, his soul, by unearthing his core fantasy. No psychoanalyst can do this, but that doesn’t matter, because Zizek wants it.  Fantasized that he had decentered man the way Copernicus and Darwin had, and Derrida voyeuristically imitated him and wanted to do this, by decentereing centeredness itself. They all failed in this, yet what matters about them is that they wanted to do it, just as the crazy youth who boils his blood as a sacrifice to some demon is indeed dangerous and untrustworthy, though demons don’t really exist.

                Our fantasy is an invisible anchor and support for our context. Democracy requires a unique fantasy, as is exemplified in Thoreau, who enacts the democratic desire. Thoreau’s basic trope in his prose is to mock those who think conventionally. He mocks the farmer who scoffs at vegetarians for lacking meat in their diet to build their bones, while his grass-fed oxen at the same time pull his plow and break the ground. His basic trope, shows the average man stupid. Is he quite an American, having this contempt for the masses? Yes, in a democracy, most men must think themselves better than average, while yet affirming the democratic rights of the average. Thoreau lived the philosopher’s life, the same as Diogenes – own as little as possible. The religion of Christians was to look forward to the future possessions in heaven where “there are many mansions awaiting.” Thoreau did not wish to live the simple life in order to earn the right to more possessions. He was Greek, and not resentful Christian. He wanted to be different now, a sort of God on earth

                The democratic problem is how to objectify the people. You cannot walk through a crowd of individuals. To walk comfortably through a crowd, you must abbreviate people into objects, and not even look at them. They become the same as rocks and trees, and if they push into you, push back into them with a compulsory “excuse me,” and no  further reception of them as persons. Whitman would look on each man and woman as an individual, and lusted for each accordingly – for to take a person intimately means to love him – and so his manner of incorporating the masses was to catalog them non-hierarchically. Thoreau and Whitman are opposite ends of the democratic fantasy. How do they combine?

                It is the power-fantasy of every democracy to be popular enough to sway the masses; rather than the dream of being a tyrant or monarch, one wishes to be a celebrity, a rock star, a movie personality. Nobody quite wishes to be president. Just as every Absolute survives by allowing exceptions, so all things survive through a tinge of hypocrisy, a conversation between being and seeming. Whitman wished to greet every fruit-peddler as his equal, and yet called himself a “Kosmos.” The American fantasy is summed up in the phrase “all men are created equal,” which implies that to be more than equal, you must be the creator. It is right that our religion of Mormonism differs from the other Abrahamic religions in identifying God as an advanced man and man as an infant God, with Adam as God of this Earth. The democratic principle, which unifies the nation into one mind, also intensifies the political importance of the individual, who amounts to so little, and therefore requires the balance of spiritual transcendency. The spiritual ambitions of Emerson and Whitman exemplify how a person must believe if he idealizes democracy.

                Myths place us in the universe and reconcile us to our world. We each need a myth that tells our own origins and how we escaped them. The myth of origins is the basic motif of fairy tales: who are my real parents? Peasants, or royalty? How do we transcend our context? Superman the comic book hero became great by escaping his context. Born on a foreign planet, he was stronger under our sun. So must we all. What we are born into, the difficulties of our childhood, our family, or situation, give us great strengths which, when applied to adult life, make all the difference. Odin, when he was imagined to be a king, was  a travelling king, and came from the East to settle in Europe. This Norse God was great because he escaped from his origins.

                To escape our context, to flee the womb, is the heroic gesture. It might rightly be said that boredom and the desire to avoid it are the pivotal drives of the human race. Its not just that we talk, but that we want something to talk about. Our instincts, like Odin or Superman, have escaped their original context, and so they are no longer natural, they are supernatural. It is the same the way we read the Iliad, though none of us worships Zeus, for this literature has universal appeal even though we may yet find the myth silly. A book is world literature when it needs no context, but adapts to every context. And so we would rightly call the supernatural that which exceeds its original nature: the man at his apotheosis, when man becomes God.

                Each citizen in a democracy must also be a god, to balance the whole against his own thing. Each of us must have a thing. When we say of our neighbor “his thing is tennis,” or “chess is his thing,” what is this thing? It is the activity that makes us feel most alive, though philosophically minded, philosophy pure isn’t my thing. Writing is. This processing of experience into crystallized words becomes my defining gesture. We each have such signature gestures, we each have our element, our place, our medium. For that thing, we can focus at long intervals. Focusing is like muscle tension, which can only last a moment, yet we can repeat it again and again, for hours and hours. For us it is easy, as hard work is easy, and we cannot resist it.

                We breath out the structure of the world. A structure is habitable. I don’t think any man could live long, even in a jail cell, without kicking a hole in the wall, or setting a doll on the pedestal, or in same way personalizing it. We own what we can control, and we control best what we create. A man can buy a house but must make a home. We own a thing by talking about it.

                A house is the body of the marriage, the embodiment of the institution. When the novelty of sex matures, it must cast off its petals and grow into a mutual daily dance.  It must materialize in love tokens and shared space. When we share an importance, we can work together for it. Commitment is the second leg of optimism. It is the principle of stupidity, to love something, to do something, ever and always, even if painful, even if foolish. A married man doesn’t ask if he could do better. He regards love as absolute, and agrees with Dante that the betrayal of the beloved is the sin worth the worst in hell.

                Don’t marriages fail? The moment of pessimism is to expect as natural the worst; commitment is committed even in pessimism, for optimism must be willing to accept the truths of pessimism. Just as every philosophy is a philosophy about all other philosophies, and every religion has dogma regarding the other religions, so every mood has a theory of the other moods, and must think selfishly if it is to be useful to the whole. Commitment makes our union the thing, and refuses to give up on it. Only through such battles and struggles do we grow intimate again, until I have you inside me, and you have me inside you, and we look more and more alike, our gestures and body language become the same, our speech and thought becomes similar, and in the final gesture, we will share one center.

                How committed should we be? Style is framed within asymptotal extremes. What do we do in extreme impossible conditions? The very idea of it frames what we do in every day things. It was said in the Sermon on the Mount that “whoever looks at a women with lust has committed adultery,” and then later that divorce was not permissible unless the partner had committed adultery. So since we commit adultery daily, our spouses can justifiably divorce us. It would have been better to say that divorce is taboo, not to be permitted, that the union of two souls is eternal: with this mythological morality we might be able to build a lasting institution. And yet you and I must stage divorces and struggles to save ourselves. All ideas require a break, all loves require a vacation. There must be an absolute balanced with its internalized exception.

                We share a style; style seduced us to love, and style grows from our love. And so each work place has a style, a city has a style, every level of consciousness has a style that we fall into it. How we respond to the world’s styles situates us. A network of relationships emerges out of every system. Wherever there are people, each has a special relationship to every single other, either directly or indirectly, so that in a thick system, a man fills many roles, many masks, many personas. We directly internalize our closest friends, and are swallowed into the larger we. Us-together is a mind that thinks through us, and my individual consciousness is merely one part of a larger brain, conscious itself, and also in turn part of a larger consciousness.

                All things are written; we can read each by the same method. The critic sees a style and divines its logic. All things contain sets of logic; interpretation can isolate a strain. Having insight into essentials, rather than trivialities, lets one use history, let’s one make it his own history, merges history with autobiography, as all history finally matters when it tells me my own story in a sense alienated enough for me to be objective. When I am quoted back on myself, I feel strengthened, my fire is fed. Emerson held the myth that all poetry is written in heaven before time began, and this is the effect the poet feels when his poem is perfected: not a letter could be changed. This is only an effect, just as God is only an effect; we tell stories, we make myths, and this let’s us get our work done.

                All things, and especially created things, have a logic to them. Perhaps a poem, perhaps a novel, perhaps the full list of a writer’s books can be taken as one whole to analyze. Each is philosophically thick, for the philosophical is a dimension of all experience. Logic is a set of dynamic relationships that bind identify and causality. No matter how many logics can be invented, there is always the full and growing logic of the all. When the absolute grows, the new redefines the old, and yet the old is eternal and inspires everything that comes after. Is it good to be first? It is just as good to be second, third, or last. Every individual is the center of his universe.

                Therefore, use the world. It will serve you. The world, the full spread of your arms, through men and women, is rich and full of hundreds of thousands of years of work. Filter your truths through many minds. Proverbs and clichés have been so proven we are sick of hearing them. Works that have been translating a million times, retold a million times, readapted into countless novels and screenplays, these might at last be interesting. I grow sick of novelty. I prefer the ordinary.

                Know a philosopher by his terms. His terms reveal how he sealed his wound. The philosophical concepts he seeks fit his attitude. What does he consider worth thinking about? He values only those ideas that channel his emotions into the right circuits. All his great concepts are little more than tubes and pipes. A coinage is from personal necessity, it is the emblem of a crisis. The style of a man sinks from his lips to his thoughts, from his thoughts to his feelings, from his feelings to his needs, his inner necessity, the basis of his being. The good reader learns all.

 

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Perfection

Is

Easy

 

www.msu.edu/~junedan

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