The Koan of the Blonde Boy

A parable is a vignette with a moral. A fable is the same in terms of personified animals. A riddle is a verbal question whose solution requires ingenuity. A koan is a sort of riddling parable. Some koans require decades of zazen, or seated meditation and full-focused concentration. My own little koan, here, is not such a hard nut to crack:

 

 

 

The Blonde Boy

 

 

A boy encountered a blond youth in the park, and called:

“Hey, hey! You cannot play here: this is my park.”

The blond smiled. So the boy shoved the youth down, but the youth smiled from the ground.

“Well you have to beat me in a game to stay here,” said the boy.

The blond stood.

“I can shout louder than you,” he shouted into the wind.

“There is a rock you know,” said the blond.

“Fool,” said the boy, “It is a basketball. See? I can beat you.”

He pushed it up into the hoop again and again. The blond raised his hand and blocked the ball occasionally. The boy felt proud to beat him.

“Do you see how many points I am making? Do you know what that means? It means I am winning.”

“It means,” said the youth, “that you think the game is basketball.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? What do you think the game is?”

“There is a rock you know,” said the blond.

“That’s not a rock, you dope, that’s a tombstone from the cemetary, I bet you if we kick at it, I can knock it over first.”

And he did kick at it, and the blond youth kicked too, but not so hard, and when the boy blunted his toe he cried, “well you would cry too if you were even trying. Its not a game if you don’t try.”

“Trying is not the game.”

“Then what? Is pretending I don’t know the game your game? Or making up games? I can make up better games than you.”

“It never gets dark here,” said the blond.

“It is my park and I say that the sun is always up.”

“That is a rock you know.”

“That’s not a rock. That’s the sun. It's made out of fire.” The boy looked at it intently, but it hurt his eyes. Yet when he looked at the blond, the blond seemed to stare at the sun with ease.

“So that’s your game. Well I can stare longer and not look away, but you will.”

He stared and stared at the sun till the tears ran down his cheeks. And he said, “Yes, it is a rock, isn’t it? I can see how you could call it a rock—but why are you leaving?”

“You lost.”

 

 

\ ~@M@~ /

perfectidius.com

 

Cables of Pain

Daniel Christopher June to the students of Life:

 

Greetings!

 

So I've finished the first workable draft to an allay in which I attempt to spiritualize and eternalize anxiety into a principle of good. Allism excludes nothing, but puts everything to work. Everything in its place with good, Anything out of its place is bad.

 

This work explores some of my persist anxieties and exposes, I hope, their logic to me.

 

Take care, Caretakers!

 

 

 

Cables of Pain

 

 

 

My radio head is buzzing

From a dozen fighting stations

From the static sunset trauma

Of anxious expectations

The horrorscope forewarned us

"Cut interlove relations

They knife your heart they knife your heart

In literal interpretation

Are you gonna leave me?

Is bossman gonna fire me?

It's happened before!

It's happened before!

The sunglair of the snow,

The sunglair in my eyes

Tightened tighter tight like screws

Stripped rivets can't unscrew

Is that disapproval in your glance?

Does disgust hide in your smile?

Is my imagination is my paranoia making that come true?

I think too much I can't conclude

Overly polite and smiling thoughts rude thoughts

Persecuted, They disapprove! They disapprove!

Can't wake up -- caffenation -- clashing nations --fight for leaders

Watch them brawl, take your pick,

They're throwing filth and chatter political

Ditties Yammer on, on my ears all night long

-- barbwire nerves, prison fence dementia

The anxious anxious anxious eyes

distorted buzz guitar, finds its ego rhythm and then...

 

Lulls, liltingly lulls, with the flowing ease of rhythm

And my heart storm concludes in a mode at tonal cadence

And that worldwide ease -- that love release

I'm pleased, I embrace all of you

The summer rules with thunderbliss

The peaceful evening loves my kiss

The cool melt moon is pregnant proud

And by my love she is allowed.

The final sigh of deep night sky rests upon my triumph brow

Humming Goddess Ama bright, cloaked in darkness and the night

Friend of the heart of my heart, I adore you, dove!

 

                The inner Self of the Needs of our Being, the core of our organism, spontaneously and reactively creates all the energy that fuels our life. Why do we read? Because we need to. Lacking that expression, we would have to find another. The energies that pour from the inner necessity are experienced by our organism, before the mind is even aware, as pains and pleasures. The primordial energy of our being, before it is differentiated, is pure crea, creative flux, expansion into the world. It is the Id-yes, the positive, the affirmative, the self-increasing logos. The mind of I, however, is the principle of negation; the focus of mind unfocuses all objects but one: by focusing on one object, we force it into being, through our body or our imagination.

                This brings us to literary angst. The undifferentiated wholeness of our feelings fall into channels of thought. Mind is symbol. Symbols act to coordinate energies, emotional energies, to define them. Thought makes them even tighter as spoken language, and language becomes concrete in actions. Thus, as we intend an experience into a meaning and into a language, we also extend it into an action.

                The focus of I, which is experienced primarily as a visual field with an invisible mental field overlaid, the other senses falling a little less from the center, is focused on the will, like a glass ball in the center of our vision which filters what ideas and objects we focus on or don't focus on.

                Those ideas in themselves move autonomous. Thoughts think in our heads, whether we will them or not. As an experience of primary memory is assumed into a concept of information, once that assumption is made into a habit of thought, it becomes an idea, information laden with desire.

                The primary experiences, however, are the pleasures and pains of our needs, which give energy spontaneously or in response to experiences.

                My language here is a bit difficult, but I necessarily bring it into the realm of abstraction to gain control over it. My focus is on one idea: anxiety. Yet anxiety is the opposite of controlled focus. Anxiety is an energy that dominates our focus, and forces us to think in rigid ways. We experience our thought as free -- we can think whatever we want -- but we receive hidden signals from the brain that there are experiences going on we know not what, memories we have forgotten. Psychoanalysis began with the Jewish prejudice that the marginal is the most important, as characterized by the slogan "The stone that the builders rejected became the corner stone," which is architecturally false. It is that incredible anxiety of the Jewish -- a guilty people -- that made psychoanalysis focus on old memories, the marginalized, the repressed, the disowned. As allists, we do not exclude either the Jews or their unique gifts, but we are focused also on the obvious, the blatant, the self-evident, the apparent. We are not aiming to ferret out hidden meanings and crown them as the most important. We have our own mode of narcissism. We insist on ourselves. This is where our search begins: on self-reflection, self-love, masturbation, suicide, self-aggrandizement, on all the relationships of a man to himself.

                Those who live in the margins of society don't take cultural truths as seriously. They can mock at them, because they are not part of them. The "saint" who cut down the sacred trees of the druids was not bold before gods, he was merely replacing the superstitions of others with superstitions of his own. In the same way, missionaries have always propagated their message through technological magic; indeed, elaborate schools tap millennia of experience to be able to spiritually overwhelm innocent tribesmen. It is easy to be an iconoclast when you think others are worshipping mere icons, rather than through icons. An iconoclast still believes in idols to think them a threat. Instead, with the condemnation of idolatry, we merely have a sort of chauvinism on how the divine may be accessed: verbal images are okay to access God, but sculptural images are bad. Yet only the Tao is truly beyond images when it speaks of the Tao, or ultimate reality, as unnamable, and its path impassable.

                We will see in all this that a man's ultimate experiences, which seem so divorced from everyday life, work deep under that life, and form the moral coordinates by which he moves his being. The ground is stabilized by stabilizing cables. The anxieties of a nation as well as the anxieties of the individual overlap as the outer limit of possibility.

                Culture balances the individual. It provokes him and limits him, and he opens it and adopts it. All cultures are basically the same: they want to control your sex and your death. They rule you through your children and your mortality. Our justice system, after all, and in the same way as all justice systems, is ultimately backed by violence. Resist the cops, they shoot you dead. Do we think such things when a cop passes us on the highway? On some level, yes.

                Ultimate figures structure our world, and certain people and objects are more representational of those figures. It is part of every psychic make-up, according to the needs of every human being, to choose the object of Importance. Whatever is most important, be it one thing or many, organizes the rest. The Importance is God or Reason or Science or Mankind. Within our mental makeup there lay also the placeholders for the unbearable and the unthinkable. What is taboo is at least thinkable. When a thing is held as taboo, we dread it, we hate it, or, if we transgress it, we feel either guilty or greatly free. Some of the surprising ideas of history come out of mystery cults and the erotic cults, from pedophiles, magicians, drunkards, addicts, or whatever else, or at least those so tempted. It doesn't matter so much what the taboo object is -- they are all arbitrary -- but that the transgressor takes them as taboo. A missionary who names the deceased, which is strictly taboo in a particular tribe, is not made "manna" or untouchable, he is scolded as an outsider who doesn't know better. He doesn't gain the stigma and the power. But if he defies his own culture's coordinates, he will gain that experience.

                The taboo is at least thinkable. We aim our hate upon transgressors. Our newspapers, with their mug-shots and descriptions of lurid facts act as a public shaming of criminals, and also a public celebration of celebrities. The criminal enacts what we secretly wish, though we don't know it, and we fight our own urge by hating him.

                Murder, after all, isn't murder. Why does literature abound with murder of every sort? Hamlet ending with a bloodbath, Moby Dick ending with a blood bath? Murder is not absolute and it does not symbolize the murder of one's father -- which would make no evolutionary sense. Murder of something physical symbolizes the murder of a principle or idea. All mental life, all feeling, thinking, saying, and doing, is ultimately propped upon a philosophy of assumptions. To write our own programs is difficult. By participating in the death of another, through literature or, in that other mode of entertainment, the daily news, we are able to introject a personal philosophy by reflecting it in two directions -- inwards and outwards. The voice always speaks in two directions.

                Nevertheless, whatever takes the place of the unthinkable will never occur to you. It is not that when you hear it said by another you freak out. It is that you are utterly bored with it, and pass it on without notice. Your mind can't focus on it for long. You seem to be distracted by something more interesting, but that distraction is made interesting on purpose, to shield you from the unthinkable. The unthinkable, after all, is a live wire, it influences what ideas fall into the focus of our I by moving ideas from below. The unthinkable cloaks itself in the unbearable.

                We all know what is unbearable. An itch can be unbearable. This minor, every day disturbance can cause an unbearable urge to scratch. Such an effect is easy to instigate. Simply sit where you are, think of mosquitoes biting you, and refuse yourself to scratch an itch. Our reflexes, and those behaviors that are nearly reflexive, are difficult to willfully deny, like holding your hand in the flame.

                But with external things, we can at least see them, and thus think them. An image that causes us unbearable discomfort -- the dismemberment of a loved one, or something like this -- can actually become desensitized. You can clear the image of its emotional valance, numb yourself to it, not care anymore. In a way, you blind yourself to its full meaning, and no longer see it. But when the unbearable surrounds an invisible idea, it is much more difficult to get at that idea. It is slippery as a salmon, and able to shift shapes.

                What is unbearable reveals our lack of control, our lack of power. Think of it: a strong man conquered by an itch! Perhaps the Olympiad can run a marathon, yet can't stop biting his nails. The mind wants to always be in power or to entrust itself to a reliable power. Thus, the mind quickly learns how to substitute unbearable pains for bearable pains. One pain kills another. I recall getting a poison ivy rash, from head to toe, as a kid. I was sternly instructed not to itch, or it would make things worse. But in the bathtub, using the medicinal soap, itching was permitted. What pure bliss to itch to my heart's content, until the poison ivy itches were replaced with welts! And never were welts more welcome: ache is better than itch.

                In the same way, our feelings, emotions, and desires structure themselves so as to move from unbearable pains to bearable pains, to put our experiences in a language we can control. The child has difficulty suppressing an emotion, but learns he can filter it through his muscles, and thus he builds an emotional circuit board through his body's muscles. The incredible anxiety of being in pain and not knowing why is alleviated by assuming guilt. Guilt is more bearable than uncertainty. Many patients would rather believe that God is punishing them than to wonder why God would allow them to suffer. In this way, ambiguous anxieties localize themselves into muscle tensions, as guilts, hysterics, and punishments. The economy of pain controls itself be channeling wild energy into thinner compact forms. When an anxiety is wrapped into a cable of pain, then it can do work for us. Our phobias, anxieties, and fears, once concentrated into solid live wires, are converted from obstacles into tools.

                All the emotions, after all, are mere flavors of frustration. We are prevented from putting our desires into motion, so they fall back on themselves, and collect more and more energy, till the mind can use them to overcome its obstacles. Some of the most persistent obstacles are fears and anxieties. Yet the pain has meaning.

                That cable of pain is a pure experience. The curious nature of trauma is that it often is painless when it happens. A kid hit by a car, for instance, may simply blank out. With intense experiences it seems as if the angels sang, and then our experience reaches infinity. There are, after all, two modes of consciousness: infinite constriction, or death, and infinite dilation, or bliss. Such moments happen in time, on the X axis. On the Y axis, the axis of eternity the infinitely smallest moment of time, reach infinity, as when a curve approaches its asymptote.

                The two directions of these asymptotes, of the unbearable and the unthinkable, are the black raven of never-more, and the white whale of forevermore, or never to be. They are necessary negations. The mind, after all, wills a thing be negating all but it. Negations tie the knots. By saying "not," the knot is tied. When translated into our muscles, these unthinkable unbearable ideas are experienced as muscle spasms; when our muscles spasm for any reason, we are reminded of such ideas.

                In this, we see that all diseases are psychosomatic, even if they are 100% organically caused. A man with a cold thinks differently than a man with a fever. Its as if all diseases could be cured with words and thought. The mind thinks through all the nerves and muscles of the body: every state of the body is a state of mind, and some thoughts are unthinkable to a person or people because their body has not experienced them. When they hear those ideas, they interpret the words to in fact refer to other ideas. Language carries no meaning, has no meanings, is merely a code for us to construct our own meanings. A meaning is a defined experience, made of the sculpting of basic memories and experiences. There is such a thing as an ontological definition of an idea, and that is when the idea is correctly felt -- when its meaning is exactly felt. The more we think of an idea, the more definitely we can feel it, though we do feel it on some level upon our first hearing, assuming that it was communicated by one with a similar background. Most people have a working familiarity with their ideas.

                Work cures worries. Moving the body eases the mind. Ideas, which are moved by energy, are felt through the movement of the body. The mind, which focus by power, might run out of that power, in a state of depression; lacking power, large stores of energy are spent, to substitute for will. Or the energies, if they are dangerous, are frozen in muscles and images, in a state of anxiety. You can't kill an idea. But you can kill the person who represents the idea. Murder puts valance over an idea. By having killed the idea's representative, or at least fantasized so, you change in your mind the valence of that idea.

                We experience a thing as pain and pleasure together. The logic of a pain/pleasure makes it into a desire. Any given desire is at its base a mélange of such pain and pleasure. The pain leads to a feeling of emptiness, which leads to sadness, which leads to fear, which leads to anger, which leads to anxiety, which leads to apathy. All those are experienced simultaneously once, but the conscious I emphasizes only one layer of it at a time. In the same way, pleasure leads to a feeling of fullness, which leads to a feeling of warmth, which leads to a feeling of love, which leads to a feeling of lust, which leads to a sense of frustration, which leads to a sense of coldness. The apathy and coldness hold hands. They are the intellectualized extremes of the inner pain and pleasure. With apathy and coldness, which characterize the doctor and physician, one can control what would otherwise be too much.

Apathy Anxiety Anger Fear Sadness Emptiness pain

Coldness Frustration Lust Love Warmth Fullness pleasure

 

                This is the loop of experience, and the weight that is put on each level characterizes the tonal valence of an idea.

                The unthinkable, the unbearable, these lack a symbol, and so we never consciously experience them. In moments of horror and panic, which seems to focus on something external, these internal ideas are at last coincidentally revealed. Horror films allow us to symbolize our own inner horrors. That we have such horrors is a good thing, as everything human is good; the system exists for a reason, it has a logic and purpose. As we mature, we do not condemn, we learn to accept and to integrate.

                In the same way, anxious ideas can be first thought only through enemies and villains. Horror movies and adventure films educate us through villains sooner than heroes -- villains usually have the minds, and heroes the hearts. The villain says his truth, and then dies. But the body of the villain existed only to deliver that truth, and he has succeeded through his fake defeat.

                Those ultimate moments of unconscious enlightenment do not discover something that existed before that moment: they define the cables of touch. A negative energy of pain persists, but is insulated like a live wire, in indifference, if not pleasure. Fear is a sense of powerlessness; like a planet held together by a black hole core, so does powerlessness become power.

                The human will, which of its own has no energy, only power--meaning it can focus or blur but lacks the energy of selection--is often overwhelmed by agencies of great energy. Since man has so many instincts, his will is able to control them. Imagine a fantastic hero who must travel through a land cut in two by a stream. On the left of the river lives a giant, to the right lives a dragon: they are both fierce and would devour him without a qualm, but they fear each other. The logical progression would be to attract their attention and deliberately walk down the middle of the stream.

                We need our distances as much as we need our intimacy. Merely to touch a body is to receive its energy, interpreting its meaning, feeling it. Contact transfers creative energy into fear and love, desire and aversion. By the touch of the world, our creative energy differentiates. The self says yes, and the I qualifies.

                All anxiety comes from negation. And all control is mastered fear; when the anxieties have been mastered, obstacles become auxiliaries. We should take pains to avoid pains. We master our pains, thus making them into pleasures. For control is always a pleasure. Just as suffering loves to brag, pleasure loves to hide. We always act in terms of the greatest pleasure. But as so much of life is ambiguous, the freewill may create a pleasure to balance the system. Hamlet, in his famous soliloquy regarding suicide -- "to be or not to be" -- is too anxious regarding the unknown of the other side to suicide, and thus he arranges a more indirect and clever death for himself, in which he will not be blameworthy.

                All societies make a taboo of suicide. It is not unthinkable, but it comes with great angst. Socrates, the literary embodiment of philosophy, made, near his death, a famous "life is shit" speech. The natural response to such sick thoughts is, "Why not just kill yourself, Socrates?" But then Socrates says that God owns us, and so to kill ourselves would be to hurt God's property, and thus offend him. Evidently he would then punish us, and we are back with Hamlet, preferring a known danger to an unknown danger.

                We can, after all, will our own suffering. "Man would rather will nothingness than have nothing to will," said Nietzsche. He preferred we speak the Id "yes," to be the yes-saying spirit, to put no faith even in truth, but to be perfidious, having faith in nothing at all but holding, hold reverence for ourselves. Self-overcoming is to submit to your own law. Tolkien, in a typically Christian fashion, has no faith in his heroes. The hobbit Bilbo fails in the end, just as his travelling companion, Gollum, fails to redeem himself. The "triumph" of the epic is not that good wins out in the end, but that evil suicides, and thus good wins by default. The evil ring, by corrupting the Gollum, brought its own end.

                But the ring legend comes from the story of when the Norse Gods stole gold from a dwarf. He begged only that they not take his magic ring, which had the power of making more gold. They take it anyway, so the dwarf places a curse on the ring. The story progresses as the ring kills off a chain of its owners. In this, the ring itself was not evil. If anything, taking away a man's livelihood is evil, and that puts a curse on the world.

                The moral coordinates of each of us impose work and family upon our daily lives. Just as one set of vertices was nevermore, to forevermore, so the other vertices are sex and murder, life and death, and, when expressed towards the self, masturbation and suicide, which both have acquired an opprobrium. Rightly understood, having control over one's pleasure and mode of death are great powers.

                When death is dead, he is borne as life, winter sinks as seeds of spring. We constantly project a world, we interpret all in terms of it. Art, after all, is the perfecting of nature, just as man is the crown of creation. Those allists who can affirm all and subordinate all, who leave nothing in the margins to plot against them, but find a place and use for everything, such ones know that rank is in the eyes, and power in the voice. Intelligence the eyes, will the voice. We are more sincere in what we say than we suspect. Such ones as the allists know how to inject ceremony, celebration, speech, and symbol into important moments of life. The Allist is a living religion, is God of it; what he says is forever said, what he does is forever done. For he is at home in the world. Home is where one is comfortable. He knows how to speak the language of all he meets he knows how to anticipate. He knows that bliss is the highest form of conversation, and the world exists for conversation. Every religion is a moment of rhetoric. "God" means "implore."

                Our religions and philosophies are worlds, to subdue chaos and angst. Those anxieties we faced are built into our bodies. Our traumas harden into tools. Every lasting anxiety becomes a permanent character trait. And to not the knot, to take apart those pleasures and pains that are so thickly bound, to commit taboo, to break the law, that is to split the atom, to release a blast.

                Marriage is a bond, a series of bonds, the bond of a vow, given on one's honor -- a man is as good as his word -- to which he pledges a lifelong relationship. To break this is to break one's nobility. And the languages of devotion, pleasure, duty, compromise, resentment, jealousy, anger, are so many cables of joy and cables of pain. When the bonds of marriage are cut, incredible energy is released.

                Your body is your world. Just as Dante crawled up his own hell to get finally to the heaven of his brow, so we all embody our world in ourselves. The heart literally expands in pleasure, literally constricts in pain, just as focus expands in pleasure, and constricts in pain. A mind in pain cannot focus on much. Pain dominates the center, and freezes the sphere of focus from expanding to gain more energy. An anxiety, by pinching a motive, drains the energy from the system, and renders us depressed.

                And so depression seeks pain, a fresh pain, to shock its system. Electroshock therapy works well in curing depression, and so do its equivalents, when a depressed mind sends out hidden signs to invite catastrophe, to flirt with death, to break down his spirit so he will let himself accept Jesus in his heart, Muhammad as the prophet, his Duty to his family, or whatever else a man superstitiously symbolizes as self-atoning. Anxiety seeks trauma, to burst. We fear orgasm, we fear losing control. So we fantasize about dreadful things, the way women fantasize about rape, to gain the sexual experience without willing it or deserving blame. I think it must be a gray savoir to free us from such games. Only the elderly have lost touch with the senses, as they approach their home-built heavens.

                Our fantasies, as expressed in the movies, in books, in gossip, in the news, in the internal experience of our own memories, which may yet be unthinkable, balance our daily strains. Everything balances, everything compensates. Only the self-increasing Self is beyond such a system. Murder symbolizes change, philosophy flows deeper. Thus, we have our rituals of transformation, as in the poems we call rites and traditions, in the literature we call scripture.

                Poetry is purified literature, the epitome of literature. The poet is not only the man who scripts, but is also the man who lives beauty. The body is an extension of the mind, just as our tools are extensions of the body. When we play life as a game, when we create the world as art, we convert all tensions into interest. We build tension, and call that excitement; we resolve tensions, and call that release. What is the basic plot of all plots but hero desires, hero struggles, desire resolves? The words we say stand for the ideas in our head, and those ideas epitomize meanings, and give meaning identity. Words have valance, meanings create tensions. The law of non-contradiction is made to terrorize us all. Yet meanings can't contradict, only negations can contradict. All meaning are positive.

                Writing is hardened language, is crystallized speech. We create worlds, we enter worlds, through reading and writing and the imaginative mind. The author's literal spirit survives in his works. In nation, nature, and religion we find ourselves situated, but writing shows another place, a different realm. The tensions of our life are put on hold. Resolving tensions is plot. Yet we can resolve our own tensions by entertaining ourselves with fake tensions, and fictional plot.

                Superstition is the poetry of life. We put meanings on all things ambiguous. The scientific think this is foolishness, just like the iconoclasts thought it immoral when we put our meanings in absurd things, just as words are used as hooks to hang ideas. It is like the grammar dork who thinks that by presenting the etymology of a word he has refuted the meaning a thinker wants to attribute to it. But meanings are irrefutable -- they are self-evident. There will always be the literalists, whether fundamentalist believers or fundamentalist disbelievers, who are fated never to get it. The mystics too, when they interpret a trope as meaning one thing, and only are things which only they could discover, are just as stupid.

                A slim set of aphorisms is the best of educations, and a teacher who could reach partway toward their infinite centers, and who could teach his students to do the same, would be better than sophisticated, he would be simple, just as the sophist is better than the philosopher, but the sage better than the sophist. Poetry is trope, from head to toe. So is a man who makes his life a poem. The innermost name of the Self, his need and necessity, emanates the meanings which are the poem of his life. Reality never catches up with the imagination, but what is imagination, after all, but preparation? Small bait, big fish. We indeed follow our bliss by living the myths, and like the Gods we let our words serve as our perfume. Lucifer was the star of Bethlehem, Odin hanged in angst gains the deepest runes.

                So we accept our suffering, if only we can use it. The tightly taut string dreams of blades. Weapons are crystallized anxiety. And even a dull wit can still bruise. When we reach, we are tantalized. We live our myths under the Maya mask of our daily doings. Daily events obliquely symbolize hidden ideas. The inner logic of philosophical programming is the creation of a tight personal grammar, for the invention of an idiolect is why we came here in the first place. Wide events move the smallest laws. If the I does yes by saying no, the self does no by saying yes--that is its independence. Experience is knowledge. But an event isn't experience until the needs have judged it. Sometimes a whole quest is evoked only to expose the hidden depth of a truism -- "be true to yourself," for instance. The treasures of the ages are simple and small.

                A serene face can mask chaos. The emotions of meaning becomes the thoughts of ideas through the metaphor mind, which is the skin between heart and mind. When we master erratic energies, they become our weapons against those who haven't. Self-reliance is the American religion, self-reliance verses group-reliance. Those who are animated by the borrowed energy of a group or church are doomed to lose their necessity, and to have their I plucked off; when they merge with some God in his heaven. They sell their soul to get into heaven. But we reflect back on each our own necessity. We master the erratic energy, we master the rhythmic energy: pain and pleasure we both subsume. We approach anxiety, we live dangerously, and so gain its energies. We know where the lines are drawn, and we know what is gained and lost as we approach them.

                The 20th century could not think without also thinking "Nazi." All the thinkers of that time are stained with Nazi anxiety. September 11 brought us to our senses, and opened up a new millennium, when mankind would become one Man, one Globe, one World.

                We must be willing to break the taboos, as needed, just as, being allists, we can transgress into any heaven or hell, and are not thereby comprehended. The unbearable is worse than death. Thus people fight wars and commit suicide. Most of us insulate those live wires of original contact. They are like spiralgrams, those drawings which have a little image in the center, with a line spiraling outwards that exaggerates the features of the inner image, more with each loop, until the outer layer seems to be something else. We want to know what a man is at bottom.

                Intensions build tensions that seek extension. Do we torture ourselves? Not unnecessarily. We live for bliss. What is torture but the art of prolonging the unbearable? We discipline ourselves. We say "self-help or no help at all." "Take on my sufferings," says the complainer, but we will not. The degree of the soul, its greatness, is in the tone of its voice. Vocal tone and body tone hold all tension and anxiety. If the anxiety is overcome and controlled, then we gain power, and our casual gestures indicate power at rest. For the hysterical, a little provocation leads to miserable outbursts.

                The Pentecostal holy rollers, who make hysteria sacred, exactly mirror the demonically possessed, while yet being filled with their own supernatural "Spirit." Thus their religion serves a function for the whole Christian world -- all denominations transfer energies through the Body of the Church -- and gives all Christians a vicarious emotional release. So thinks the schizophrenic body of the Bride.

                Marriage systemizes pleasure. Marriage is not the negation of bliss, but its careful articulation. The more intimate a couple becomes, the more careful they must be. Just as institutions are the buildings that hold them, so is a marriage the home of the family, and the home is the body of the mother. Houses think, they think through us, we are the souls of the home. Emotions are spaces, and so we map our minds and bodies upon geography. A city really can be "the heart of the nation," and another, "the mind of the people." And wars do more than settle boundaries.

                Killing is identification, to kill is to assume. A country kills through wars, and through its televised trials. To hear a story is to participate. We share national symbols, which are forced into everybody. We can react against them, but we have to react. We structure our energies by internalizing symbols. A symbol is a network of channels for our energies, which, though differentiated, are given a satisfaction amongst equivalencies. Symbols translate our desires into realistic achievements, run our channels to flow and work.

                The inner channels are the human instincts, which build more than nature needs, and so require artificial articulations. In the dark, ropes look like snakes. We also have an instinctive dread of dismemberment, just as children fear being devoured, and so are fascinated by stories of the big bad wolf or little red riding hood. The instinctual is fascinating, and the magicians of language and stories know how to use these universal energies to fashion their symbols.

                Eventually our ideas get overladen with affect -- as one idea stands for another -- and because of this, subversive "poetry" can short-circuit the work. All subversion is possible because a language is cut off from the experience that created it. All we have of the writings of Democritus are atoms, yes, but even the ever-so studied scriptures mean something for us that it could never have meant for its writers. A meaning can be translated, but a beauty cannot. Beauty is expression, articulation is art. You cannot translate a poem. But meaning survives being formulated in thought, and language, so one meaning can create a wide range of arts, and many permutations of philosophies. In this, I am the Meaning.

                Writers become representative. Gass stands for bitterness, Zizek for resentment; Emerson is optimism, Nietzsche empowerment. They stand for moods and tones, they think for us. We may not see how much they inform our spontaneous thoughts. Worn shoes don't pinch. Those writers who were demonized by their contemporaries we take as being wonderful, if a bit quaint. Only if you permit yourself to be wrong can you finally be right. Such gods as the philosophers and artists gave us room to stretch our limbs, space to make mistakes wrong. Imagination makes painful choices preferable, it makes the harder thing to do the more pleasurable, so that we can be heroes through thinking ourselves so. Worrying pays no debts, but yesterday's trials are today's pride. We sing, "the more love, the more drama; the more money, the more worries," but a man must finally take root and live. If anger ends in shame, bear your burden on your own, follow your bliss, for a beauty seen is a beauty known. What we know we may become. Wolf the belly, hawk the eyes, god the mind, angelic thighs.

                Every sect is a quiltation of relevant scriptures. We too use national proverbs, we are not ashamed to take from any source. All world literature begs us to quote. Fools throw insults like boomerangs, but when we quote a thing we give infinite blessing upon it, an honor to the author of that idea. Choose wise minds to serve as auxiliaries. Make your friends into fingers and hands to do what you can't. We each have a sense of our rights and worthiness, and we maneuver ourselves neither higher nor lower than we feel we deserve, even though we pretend our actual station in life is beneath our desserts. Most people are lazy in either mind or body, but seldom are they both. When teaching a people, bank on their laziness. They don't want to read twice. We, however, write things that must be read continually for a lifetime to be fully understood. Is that cruel? But kindness can be cowardly, and more often so than brave. There is no fool like an educated fool, but greatness transcends envy.

                How easy to forgive a wrong that never touched you. Yet we drop all those games. We are not like the woman who first loved her man, and then, disillusioned, loved only love. We are not Platonic enough for that. We persist in loving our own, face to face. A coward would sooner die than defend himself, but we insist on our rights, and snarl at those who would impose or demand we be polite. We make no excuses -- we insist on ourselves.

                The fear of expansion, orgasm anxiety, avoids heaven on purpose, for God would snatch your mind from your necessity. We submit only on exacting terms. We love only upon commitment. We know that a man can intellectualize his moods without experiencing them, but we are the vital touch that is unafraid to grasp the fire. Rhythms are moods, we dance to our music as the tones of soul move through our blood. We dare to try, we will not be intimidated. We knot nots and we not knots. We say the Id yes and the I no. For I do know how to set the coordinates to my own life, I know how to play the game. Man is the symbolic animal. I become that child thing.

                Marriage is a noble form, but it is only a symbol. We must pour our own energies into it, and where we think we got "lucky" in choice of partners, the scales will balance; and if we ever wish to cheat or stray or lie, the truth is expressed somehow, even if it is never made known. The scales always balance, the universe compensates. Fidelity and sincerity are the speech of marriage. All relationships are conversations. Marriage is the conversation of intimacy, the creative intercourse by which families are borne. Marriage is an artform. And whether a man commits himself to a family, or a project, he would best do both, to have his job, his life-project, and his work, the creative trinity, and let each feed the others, and balance and check each other.

                Habits are cobwebs that grow into cables. The cables of pain, of infinite anxiety, are obstacles which anchor us if we don't comprehend them, but which support our towers if we do. Just as a bird cannot fly lacking gravity pulling it down, so all obstacles are auxiliaries when rightly understood.

                Instincts manifest as fantasies. We do good to consider them. The most fantastic fantasies seem merely to amuse us while yet communicating the hidden truth they represent. I used to in moments of anxiety imagine thrusting a railroad spike into my forehead. I was uncertain what such an image meant, but it was spontaneous, I didn't choose it. It represented the fantasy of self-impregnation and suicide at once, when we bring death and sex home to the self and unite the strange equation of knowledge and death. The ego negates, the self asserts. Those knots of love and fear make the dynamos of creativity, the triangular womb.

                A suicidal image eases an anxiety by putting a cap on a panic. Just as a person, embarrassed, exclaims, "I could just shoot myself!" the gesture is rhetorical. Nietzsche said on bad nights suicidal fantasies helped him sleep.

                The self is divine, it emanates Gods and Heavens. Auto-eroticism is our natural sacrament, Reflective Meditation before a Mirror our natural practice. The sun of the innermost self and the I of the mind above it, the freedom and necessity of our being, we celebrate every day, not by cutting the Gordian knot of our fate, but by tying the whole world in its logic.

                We set the cables of pain, with their infinite anxiety, we insulate them, we know how to use them. We deny no emotion or personal reality, we love the ego, we love the self, we integrate it all. We take ourselves allistically, and deny nothing, not even denial. This is the Door of Apotheosis, and when we Negate the I through ultimate independence, we Eternalize the Logic of our being, carrying the metaphor of our divinity into the great watchful Goddess, our marriage to the All.

 

 

\ ~@M@~ /

perfectidius.com

 

America's Most Powerful Essay!

Now free as an audiobook, read by Daniel Christopher June

 

This is the second essay out of Emerson's book, the Conduct of Life, which, after his first two series of lectures, is his most powerful work. This essay, just as the one before it, shows an Emerson who is not disillusioned of his optimism, but made stronger as that optimism has been challenged by the harsh realities of life. It is Emerson at his best, the inspiration of a nation.

 

http://www.perfectidius.com/power.mp3

 

 

\ ~@M@~ /

perfectidius.com

 

"The Creative Womb" an allay

The Creative Womb

 

            The wisdom of our century is knowing that a world is made by interpretation. Some stubborn facts have an inevitable weight, but overall they style of our world is self-created. The Universe, who is all things and nothing, holds infinite worlds, and each person expresses herself into a series of worlds. Each world is a game, with its own rules, its own emphasis. We each choose the world that furthers our purpose.

            Poe did more than write macabre literature, but he lived a macabre life: the use of drugs and the projection of a gothic atmosphere made the reality he was comfortable in, the world he epitomized into his art. Art, after all, is the epitome of a world, the emphasis of the aspects of our world which we give to the public so we may share a world.

            The work of a work of art is in our apprehension and appreciation. The art works on us. When the art perfectly symbolizes the values of the creator, that art becomes itself artist, and fashions those who engage it in aesthetic contemplation. The symphony makes our lives a symphony, the dance makes our days a dance. As we see, so we are. Art holds the special ability to communicate worlds, to give us those stubborn experiences that we can't explain away. Art is formative.

            Our actions are submerged in language, our language is submerged in thought, our thought is submerged in meaning. From felt and definite meanings we set a logic, from layers of conflicting logics we make a language, from the desires and intents of language we make a living in the actions of our daily existence. Tone unifies. A book is one if it holds one tone, or a range of tones that unify into one overtone.

            The deepest of our memories is a sort of archetypical life-myth which we use to build our agenda. Our memories fall into an order of emphasis, a story, based on the river bed of that original myth. The personal myth is part inborn, part learned, and part chosen. We gain access to worlds, to mystics, philosophers, poets, and heroes, to the gods who subsume them, through art appreciation, including that special kind of art called religion, which is art framed as utter importance.

            Appreciation is an accumulation of interactions with the elements of a genre till they become prominent. We maybe have to hear a song a dozen times to know all the lyrics. The first time, only part of the chorus stood out. This same process characterizes falling in love. First, we see the beauty of the beloved. Next we learn of her goodness, of which the beauty is a symbol, then we learn of the reasoning by which she structures her virtues, and finally we learn about her meaning, her sense of life, her inner heart. Art cultivates grace. When we have studied a work of art, we have also mirrored a study of our inner being.

            Art is the culture which balances individuals with and against the all. Art is compensatory. Art balances. Ugly art is a balancing of an ugly situation, maybe giving the lie to saccharine idealists. Art expresses frustrated desires, let them flow and have free play. What is a desire, after all, but an obstructed action? We build with surplus energy, become restless, and look for creative expression. We lead mild lives and are oppressed by the ordinary. The tedium of our daily duties becomes intolerable. Eventually, we start to fantasize, to escape into literature, to dream of some adventure or some misadventure. Those fantasies are part of the creative womb of our daily life: they are part of the scene, objects in our world. We care about them because we mind them.

            The rites and ceremonies of religion and justice express the power of art: religions are modes of participatory art. Just as the Christian congregation sings hymns together as one on Sunday morning, so does the church body continue the dance of the community during their dispersion throughout the week. All religions are this way.

            The creator who chooses to create new forms, rather then creatively filling old forms, is always a danger to society. His floating emotions merge with his floating ideas in his unconscious, he begins to believe in himself, to insist on himself. His inner divine is able to make violence in the logosphere and mythosphere of our shared world, perhaps to fill a spiritual hole in the collective experience. He offers escape to the oppressed, for escape his freedom. He builds a new discipline, a new way of life. Common experience may be the subject of all great art, and also of those forms of art called religions, but each genre makes a difference, offers something only it can offer.

            Criticism is judgment, and sympathy is necessary to make that judgment. Only what we love can we know, for knowledge is love, just as truth is understanding. The knowledge of having experienced something transfers into the understanding of a criticism. We may, after all, hate a thing merely because our style clashes against it. Art is a stylized experience. All art is a consummated rhythm, a building of excitement and a release of resolve.

            Cities have rhythm which counterbalance the rhythm of states, nations, and the world. We all conspire together, we all breath the same air. Ama I call the Oversoul of America, but names never mattered as much as meaning. Art is part of our environment. Art sets the tone, music sets the rhythm. What are our internal emotions, after all, but themselves music? Art speaks a language of convention, a set of expectations, but so does all of life. All cultures have patterns and codes. We would not hate a tribesman if he in ignorance walked the streets unclad, but if an leering man did so, we would arrest him on charges of indecency.

            Science also gives us an environment. Science is the picking apart, the intellectual, and art is the putting together, the passionate. Art gives us our moral environment -- not the rules but the reality of our morality -- and science gives us the tools to criticize and challenge those rules. We inevitably absorb and identify with our surroundings: the man in the desert grows stark and callous, the northern folk are prepared for terror; religions are born in creative wombs, in literal environments, in climates and times. A religion universalizes and eternalizes when it is able to transcend its immediate environment, to apply to all men and not merely to a tribe.

            Art is the measure of a culture; morality is poetry stacked; art is a wind vein showing us what the future holds. History gestures to the past; science, philosophy, and religion gesture to the eternal; art gestures to the future. Worlds create art, make certain ideas and expressions seem inevitable to us, even unique and spontaneous, as if we hadn't absorbed a million ideas subliminally. Yet each man from his innermost self, that unique and divine name he is, sheds a positive addition to the universe, gives himself as a gift, and is able to create something that has never been created before, could never created again, and can only be created by you yourself. We emanate our being in all we do, and publish ourselves for all time into the universe.

            Art uniquely combines love and truth, beauty and power; art unifies work and play into a playwork, the work of art. Art is beautiful, so in the province of love, yet art inspires, shows us possibilities, gives us the desire to realize those possibilities in ourselves, shows us the ways to gain them. Art shows the world that a philosophy can make. A table of values, a way of loving, evokes certain modes of thinking, certain ways of creating our world.

            Our inner name resonates across the universe. Certain memories from our childhood resonate with it, stand out, and become our life story. The difference between a happy childhood and a bad one is mostly interpretation. And just as certain memories are selected to put the access and emphasis on our lives, so does our voice pick up invitingly when somebody comes near us who is after our own, who resonates with us, soul to soul. In this way, that central energy and power evokes our full fate, chooses the music that will move us, chooses the friends who will love and empower us, chooses the books we will read, puts the objects in our hands that belong in our hands. We come to this life to create, to create something of the world and of ourselves, to grow into divine beings. Once we know our purpose, all things fall into place like tumblers in a lock.

            The rock stars who indulge in sex, drugs, and rock and roll are not being extravagant. They need that world and those tools to foster a state of mind that can create and express that genre of music. Even if this particular band or that is able to get by on just the rock, that is only possible because the world of rock and roll has been set up by those who indulge.

            In the same way, we all set up oscillators which energize our world, which echo back our energy and intensify it, pressing us to seek the extreme of our own logic.

            We choose our forms and stay loyal to them. We marry ourselves to our forms, the ones we have commingled, individuality with community, self to world. We are inspired yes, but we also emanate: we emanate our own being with the breath of the muse who speaks to us. It is inspiration versus articulation, Dionysus versus Apollo. The inspiration has ambiguous form, the articulated, definite form.

            And so let us ornament our lives with intimate and evocative objects. A poster of our hero, paintings of our ideal scene, colors to go with our creative project, these are the environment of our creative womb. The diet we eat fuels that special thing we are each to do. You are what you eat. The very flavors and styles feed into your work and your play. The friends you choose balance you out, tempt you to go farther, warn you to mind your weaknesses. The books you read, the poems you love, though these are all chosen in reference to what you by nature love, once you become conscious of what your project is, you can more deliberately filter out distractions and impediments. Look long into your mirror, in that form of meditation called reflection. Repeat your name to yourself. Have a daily orientation where you consider your life goal and the goal of this decade. Reinforce all your work, push yourself to higher triumphs. Never let yourself be comfortable, but prod yourself to greatness.

            In this way we may create the creative womb by which we build the art of our lives, our very lives which are forms of art. In this way, we build our literal heaven, and we prepare our ethereal body. The very build of our muscles, the shapes of our face and nerves, reinforce that heaven, which in turn changes the mind, the I, our necessity. By giving our life theme music, a set of songs that reinforce our goals, diversify our purposes, and express every emotion of our heart, we gain momentum. All those resonators feed into each other and intensify each other. What we say to others and how we treat them changes them; they will mirror us, echo us, show us ourselves, become more like us, and we like them. Your full body is in your body of possessions, your full spirit is in the friends you hold, your full soul is in your sphere of influence, which reaches to the edge of the Universal All. There are worlds within worlds, and you are god of your world. Your words are magic, and create reality. Everything you do creates more you. The reward of virtue is more self. Good deeds do not get you into heaven; they show you are already there.

            In this way, those things that speak to us also resonate with us; what we love also loves us; we can only see the beauty that we already are; and because we are able to sincerely hope for a thing proves that we should hope for it, and in the stretches of eternity, the heart will always be answered.

 

 

 

\ ~@M@~ /

perfectidius.com

 

some notes toward an essay on "the distance of genius"

 

"The Distance of Genius"

 

 

                The central needs of mankind, with the core of material needs that necessitate themselves first, make every people's primitive years approximate the others. We would expect the same if high culture to be somehow wiped out (a favorite fantasy of Hollywood and the pious). However, a group is a group; all groups resemble each other. We all answer the same needs in similar ways. The genius is the one who can accomplish two things: expand his portion of culture a sphere above, and also link it back to the vital core. On his wings, high culture flies a little higher, but having grabbed that star from its sphere, he finds his way back in the fall of innocence, when freedom returns to necessity. With the genius a deeper necessity meets a higher freedom.

                Living in our modern cities, where we think we need cars, and the politically interesting distribution of their necessary oil, we have an abstracted society. I can work a 30 minute drive from my house, and drive back and forth each day. Of course this would be impossible a few centuries ago. Technology does what it always has done: distanced us from nature. As eating cooked foods led us to evolve an inability to eat raw food; as medical marvels allowed our weaknesses and deformities to thrive, so that most people must wear artificial lenses to see at all; so is every man more and more alienated from nature -- surely the best age to live in under the auspices of our dawn. With distance is freedom. Freedom is power, and power is the opposite of love. How then to regain the intimate touch, with all this distance? The psychoanalytic alienist who would analyze us further and farther apart is no help: they merely packaged their private fantasies as universal science. Religion is often helpful, but the pious are a mockery in all the Universities (which stand for man's relation to the Universe). We need a wisdom free from such sneering assault.

                Occasionally the criminals, the insane, and the criminally insane instigate immediate contact by direct violence. By violating the distance and shattering open an intimacy they give us something to look at, worry about, care about. As we judge them, we share in their experience. There is such bloodlust in justice. The reality television shows about cops and court cases and biographies of killers will put the lie to anybody who disagrees. We are voyeurs to the criminals; they are the darker celebrities, but they put on no less of a show than the angelic idiots who star in movies.

                The man of genius must be innocent of all that. That is, he must experience it, understand it, immerse, and then transcend. This is the worst of the world, the dirt we wash off in our daily showers.

                We make our whole lives a symbol for our truth; our life is the beautiful representation of the meaning we are and give. Genius is always the breaker of the limits of the heavens, that plucks a higher sphere from the celestial order, and brings back a new spiritual technology for his fellow gods, and later, for the people en masse. It is necessary for genius to build a higher heaven, grab its spermatic light, and fall into innocence, impregnating the purity of the inner hell with a new divine. When the circumference and the center kiss, worlds and orders are made anew.

                The universe was not created by the word, but by the music, the singing and humming of the Mother as she knit her being into the full glorious All. Intimacy emphasizes resonance, distance emphasizes cacophony. To get distance, a man may fixate on one small problem. Friendships end over a stupidity. But that is pretext. The real reasons are spiritual and final. Perhaps in that moment of stupidity I put a bit of my soul in your innermost. It is necessary we now fall away.

                The genius is ever distant from the common mind. The common mind is necessary, is even beautiful for what it is. But wisdoms taste ignores the call for humility, that ugly arrogance and patronizing pretense. The trope of those self-righteous imps mouths "I'm better than you, so when I act humbler than you, you should be truly humiliated." Those who bow deserve to bow. Those who stand will forever stand.

                The genius is in his flesh an eternal gift to the world. He does not bless the world, he is the blessing to the world, to heaven, to heaven's heaven, to God, to the gods, and to Ama, who is all of them. The shining one gives the logic, the language, and the story. The world gets the story simple enough, but doesn't pay attention to the language, the students get the language but don't get the logic. The philosophers get the logic, but don't get the meaning. The mystic gets the meaning, for he already knows it intuitively. The meaning, the logic, the language, and the story. We only see what we are ready to see. Who blinds us? Our own ignorance. Why does our ignorance do this? Because he is wise. Our omniscience clouds us in ignorance, because our soul is not prepared for the full light. We must in our being equal the greatest light. If we opened our eyes too soon, we would be followers of some other life, be followers and worshippers only, and lose the truth and possibility of shining higher than God and Being in our own growing self. The meaning of the mystic, the logic of the philosopher, the language of the poet, and the story of the hero: when we embody them, we will coincidentally see them in the world. For the one who claims he has, don't believe him. Perfection is no boaster. What God would want to impress a mortal? Beauty needs no praise, and Ama needs neither men, women, children, or plants to worship her: she is self-sufficient. She worships us. She leads us to join her in her exultation. Her kiss is the gift of exuberance.

                See that shining one? His eyes are a shield of judgment. We pull back and hide our shame when he passes. Those silly angels I am always falling in love with: their whole transcendence is in the lilt of their neck: by flitting their head afloat their neck, as if bobbing on thought, as if their mind were not part of their body, they too float through the world, and nothing ugly can reach them. When pain and ugliness does touch them, it is not their angel it touches. They are on that level always tranquil and focused. I cast eyes at the angels, and they follow me in entourage across the rainbow bridge.

                Understanding is acceptance. My brow is always the square of structuration. Do they laugh when we say such things as this? This wouldn't be true if they failed to laugh. They huddle in the shell of their own religion. Religion is, after all, organized importance. What is important? Whatever one patterns his life on, the basis of his life, that is his importance, no matter what he mouths in other directions. Mouthing pretenses is also important to him--what a man does exposes what he believes; his words only seem to confuse matters, unless one knows how to hear. Our will to power is in incorporating what the enemy has left out, of seeing what the others have blinded themselves to.

                The genius is an outcast, but that is merely the story of those who think they have cast us out. We walk in and out, we cross heavens and dimensions, and no world can bar our path; they say of our whimsical jaunts: we guide it, we cast them out, we pay them, we support them, we allow them. They are like the kid who commanded the setting sun to disappear, and then boasted throughout the twilight that the sun had obeyed.

                The world belongs to the ones who own themselves. The brave inherit the world. The Gods create new worlds.

 

 

 

Snow Frog!

Just sculpted a snow frog today!

Danny

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

\~ @M@ ~/

perfectidius.com

 

"Distance and Intimacy" an allay

Daniel Christopher June to the Students of Life: Greetings!

 

So as some of you know, I've spent the last three weeks drafting an allay regarding distance and intimacy. An Allay differs from an essay in that it mixes genres, uses a poetical cadence, juxtaposes seemingly unrelated ideas, and emphasizes the metaphorical.

 

This allay stems from a concern I've had all my life: how do we get close to each other, and why do we fall apart?

 

Characteristically, I negate particular religions in my prose, while affirming the divine we each have access to, and my reference to the best in us as our god nature, and you and I, when we know who we are, as gods might frighten some. But that's the nature of my prose, and is seldom absent from any of it.

 

It took weeks of careful work, but I consider this merely a rough draft. I will return to it in maybe a few months.

 

I had intended on publishing book 2 of The Perfect Idius on February 12, but in fact the entire book, which is now over 800 pages, is only part way done, and may require another year of preparation.

 

In the meantime, I have restructured book 1, which I call The Life of Allism, and will have a second edition out by December.

 

I hope you are well. Thanks for reading any portion of this sizeable essay. Your feedback is invaluable to me.

 

Take care, Caretakers!  

 

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

 

 

 

Distance and Intimacy

 

 

 

 

 

 

                Life is a game of distance and intimacy, of the fear and power of distant and the love and affection of closeness; we each keep objects at the distance that puts them in their sharpest focus -- closer for some, farther for others. Winning the game of life means putting ourselves and our world in such a strategy, in such a strategic placement, in such a situation, that we hold intimate what we love, and control the distance of what we fear. Mastery of love and power is mastery of life; "space" contains all the dimensions of purpose, the layers of heart and layers of mind, the internalized world, the internalized people; the Game of Life is in matter, in the matrix of space and time. Intimacy and space, which determine energy, is the ontological playing field of work and play; proximity is the metaphor that holds all relationships.

                I sit upon my work and I write something which amuses me. I look it over and frown. Others will think it foolish! Then I wonder: how did my critics get into my head? How is it that when I read that satirical verse, even when I laugh at it, I wonder a bit what the author would say about me? I am already being myself situated when I see how that author treats others. I must remember, we all must remember, that the ultimate relationship, before kin, before the universe, before God and the divine, is a man's relationship to himself. This alone is sacred, this alone is all important. The rest stems from this. Though we seem to care of the opinions of others, that is mere projection of our own intimate, unknown judgments. Fate is a thread spun in the heart.

                Consider the fates of Gods and Men. Odin died by occasionally breaking his own oaths, till his mistakes gained enough power to reply to him; Jesus died by breaking his own commandments, he died for his own sins on the cross; Buddha was done in by an illusion, for while being wise about spiritual illusions, he did not see through material illusions, and so ate poisoned mushrooms; Whitman, with his love for All of America, breathed with relish as he lay on his elbow loving, democracy's grass, but for lack of Southern sympathy lost touch over half his body, and died halfway paralyzed, only slowly learning his missing love; Socrates was poisoned by the very wine with which he poisoned the youth: we call this the nectar of return. The wound you made when you entered the universe is the wound you'll exit when leave. I too drink the fruit juice down and call it the "nectar of return," I know what I am after in this. What I take in to the intimacy of my being I must approve as worthy of me. I drink the intimacy of my being I must approve as worthy of me. I drink the karma of my words and actions maturing outside me, what is needed returns as my own.

                We are thrown in the world, objected and subjected, we are a set of needs, a mess of demands, and the most real thing in all of it, more than any cogito ergo sum, is the undeniable reality that I need: such a truth comes before philosophy nor can it ever be practically doubted. Nothing is more intimate to my being than the own of my soul, the needs of my self, my center.

                So here I am, wondering what to eat, wondering who to love, wondering where I am. Man has no natural food. Man has no natural relationship. Only the artificial is natural to man, man is only satisfied when surrounded by art. Nature is not perfect enough for man. Art perfects nature; man is the crown of the earth. Intimacy is natural, but must be aligned by artificial language. Symbols are man's food. Is my language capable of drawing my own?

                I see these people around me. Are these the ones I am to love? Are these the ones I am to serve? I become a loving, understanding, patient, serving husband and take it as one of my pride. But part of me remains ironic. That role is something, but it is not it. My family could, after all, die violently in a car crash tomorrow. Then am I without purpose? And I myself could be maimed or mentally crippled by the same crash. Surely anything that can be taken from me is not it. This religion I happen to have been born in would be a different religion were I born in Pakistan: Jesus is not it. Anything that can be denied or replaced is not it. What is ultimately it: my self and my own. My emanating soul is the ultimate reality of all I am. My soul produces truth. The most necessary is already owned. Truth from the world serves as a mirror. What we love out there we hold in here.

                What is the truth, what is my triumph? Authors write for authors, poets rhyme for poets; we speak to our own, we love ourselves, and those like ourselves. I find affinity with all things powerful and playful, who smack of my style in these allays, in this diverse melting pot of materials, passionately edited with an increasing occult undersense. These words are my skin, these words are my touch. I sense such love in the skin of my lovers -- there is no denying the unspeakable, and silence will never be refuted. There is already such silence in the lisp of these words.

                So I learn from the Tao, who is a black oil, just as I watch that humble matriarch, who is the oil of her family: wherever there is an anxious gap, she fills it; she is goddess of the gaps. That man, he is the angel of his wife's will: when she speaks in a direction, he is legs and hands to grasp. For there are two kinds of servants: the weak masses who from inertia obey the willful and the most powerful of the powerful, who choose a mask of irony. Humble people are shrewd to make their actual lowness into a virtue, but the humble gods use humility as a mask of deceit to avoid unwanted contact. Silence is my halo, my love goes unremarked.

                I love what you cannot love in yourself, you humble gods. I love in those I love the part they do not know, the part they cannot know. I see beauty in your eyes you never have imagined. You can stare down your mirror but will never find it out. You gods need each other and you also need me: we are full when we press our love. Oh my lovers! you give me some, and I ask for more. You call that ungrateful. I call it the highest gratitude? If I love you, and then fall at your side exhausted, sleep is no insult. We're free to each other, but what of the world? Let us come back down to earth and study man.

                There are two classes of men, in a range of gradations: the abstract class and the material class. Every excess seeks its limits, every virtue balances itself with vice; the extreme rich and the extreme poor both parasite the working class and the middle class, which are the mind and body of mankind.

                The material class prides itself on fighting and fucking; the middle class prefers prettier words; but only the elites are able to purify these basic desires. The abstract class answers concrete needs with abstract expressions; the material class answers abstract needs with materials things. No wonder they necessitate one another.

                Death and birth, murder and orgasm, violence and sex, these are the poles of human life, the ultimate gestures on which all of society functions. We are just as unlikely to voyeuristically witness real and intimate love-making, except of ourselves, as we are too see real and absolute death, except of our loved ones. Even sex has become something abstracted. "Safe sex," which cannot result in pregnancy, is an abstraction. Of course it is unnatural, it defies the essential purpose of sex; one aspect of sex -- pleasure -- is abstracted from the purpose of the pleasure: conception; and an entire psychological theory is fitted out to show that this is the most natural and healthy lifestyle. It is a way to live, no doubt about it, but let's not kid ourselves. It is an art form, artificial; it is anything but natural.

                As our foods are abstracted into purified sugar, which, like sex, was not evolved to be indulged in its purified form, so is pornography distilled sex. In this, man overcomes the logic of his own apparatus. Is that something to be lamented? To overcome is surely a sign of man's power, and no other power is relevant to us. Is not overcoming the globe's climate a trophy of power? But to overcome the damage would be even better. In the same way, overcoming sex is one triumph, but overcoming "pure" sex would be a greater triumph. After all, it is the material class that is having all the babies, and the abstract class that has none or maybe one, in sacrifice and deference to a "Career," that abstracted artificial thing that stands in for the maternal and paternal instincts. Sex is intimacy and the symbol of love, yet of itself it's lacking. Love must bow to power.

                Intelligence is distance. A mind that can make a distance is by definition intelligent. Distance is the control which only abstraction can grant. The garbage man who handles the trash and who is face to face with his materials is presumably less educated than the Head of Sanitation, who himself is really no less a garbage man for his clean pleated suit, and yet who might move on to managing some entirely different sector, maybe a utility company.

                Is this always the case that intelligence is abstracted? Doctors and psychologists are usually more educated than the rest of society, yet they seem to have the closest intimacy with their materials, putting their hands and scalpels into our very bodies, and the psychic equivalent, with the psychologist. But this is possible only through Latinized jargon to stand in for body parts, through working in a sterilized hospital facility, and through a code of medical ethics that is constantly policed by boards and reinforced by litigation; the doctor is not free to make mistakes or "be himself," except within a narrowly-defined set of parameters, including pledges and oaths to keep strict confidentiality, and to maintain the absence of sexual expression. It seems, that after all our cultivation, the spoken oath and the scrawled signature, our most basic civilized technology, created thousands of years ago in darker times, is still the ultimate material basis by which all else follows. The entire apparatus, the justice system, with all its legalized violence -- the system is nothing more than legalized violence -- falls back on its own self-justification of the mystical worth of a man's word. Some intimate breath animates the distance of law.

                Science cuts, but it is not intimate. The philosopher and mathematician are even worse, since they are among the most abstract of thinkers. Making their ideas well-defined and integrated enough to pass through language as ideas and not mere words requires a strong dose of the concrete; but unlike the law, philosophy has no recourse to murder. And as all ideas stand ultimately on death or sex, the philosopher is ultimately a lover -- intimacy is sought with certain philosophers and exclusion is kept with others, that's the hard fact, or in the university, where there is, by definition, no possibility of a philosopher, those in a philosophy department have the continual gesture towards paycheck.

                Institutions, after all, are power-structures, always backed by some mode of violence, with the ultimate gesture towards death, which protects the integrity of forms. Marriage as a form, doctoring as a form, the terms of the medical manuals as forms, what keeps such things in place? What keeps wrongful innovation from sinking in? Ultimately the law and the lawyers and judges conserve them. Disobey the judge and they will subdue you. Resist that and they will beat you down. You are playing the world's game as soon as you step into society.

                And yet each of us is already a violence in the world. The world mutilates the infant into the appropriate form for his society, and the child, in turn, elbows his way in and stubbornly insists on himself. The tensions relieve and he becomes a citizen. Now that he's here, we would miss him if he were gone. He is a thought to the world. And so many openings exist in the world which none of us know of, but when a man stands up and says this speech, sings that song, writes that book, makes this thing, we immediately know he has eased our ache. A million opportunities are invisible to us, a million gaps waiting fulfillment. The "aching gap" is the center of every discussion, the interest that we speak is to fulfill. "To fill it up is our thought's destiny. Some words bring us nearer to that consummation. Some the gap negates as quite irrelevant. Each swims in felt fringes of relations of which the aforesaid gap is the term." We each have infinite meanings, are, in our innermost, as divine, eternal, and infinite as anything that ever existed, but our expression into this world, into this civilization, always seems partial, since we are unconscious as to just how infinitely important each of our actions is. How is the mind to process infinity?

                The conscious mind, after all, can only focus on four things apace, to the fourteen million a moment of the unconscious mind. And if you think those four million things exhaust the full thinking of our being, you are gravely mistaken. The only reason a man doesn't see how powerful and large he is is because we are shown as much as we can take, and given new powers only when we've proved to ourselves we can handle responsibility. The entire universe colludes a system of checks and balances on every abuse. Might makes right, for power is by its nature a virtue.

                It might seem that so much of power in society is masculine, such as police violence, the guns, the jails, but in fact the most ubiquitous power is female power, and this has only been breaking up and diminishing since the feminists tried to philosophize their ideas, and hence put them into the domain of men. The fates, the norns, the weird sisters, were always women, necessity is a woman, the innermost necessity of each person is feminine, and the conscious I, the freedom, is the masculine. Freya, Queen of the Gods, knew all, but aid nothing. Once she spoke her vision, to save her son an untimely death, it caused the very demise it was intended to prevent. Female logic works in circles, not in lines.

                There are computer programs that can play the game 20 questions, asking indirect roundabout categorical questions that seem to be leading to no certain answer, when at the end the exact answer is almost invariably given. So does society insinuate all its ideas into our heads, so that we think we are original when in fact the ideas are thinking themselves through us, expanding through us, though we get the privilege of adding the idea of our own inner self to each that we think. Subtle ideas in a million tiny forms set us on our way. Only in extreme disobedience does the masculine punish. But for subtle disobedience, the female ever punishes, and it is harder to realize when and how you are being punished with women. It is not power, but love, and it is inescapable and is in its way evil. Maid Satan seduces Allfather back into her womb at the end of time.

                We have the very definition of psychology, of psychotherapy in this: psychotherapy is the science of insinuation. Anybody who carefully reads the works of Sigmund Freud or Carl Rogers soon realizes that these men discovered nothing in their patients that they did not first (unconsciously) put within them. Not science at all, but an art of manipulation characterizes therapy, which Freud used to do evil and which Rogers used to do good -- honest men though they both strived to be.

                Yet the scientifically minded are already half deceived. The scientific fools like to sneer at myths and poetry and anything created before the year 1500. They don't realize that the old myths, the old poems, the old religions, are a great and sophisticated technology that lives with us still. In American, in Europe, the very language is spattered with the blood of Christian terminology. Every aspect of our world is littered and saturated with the names of gods and myths. More than that, myth and religion evolved into permanent structures of our brains. The images and forms of religion are infinite in themselves. There need by no Apollo for the idea of Apollo to really be divine and infinite and powerful.

                So let's scratch a little mythological short hand to explain this business of intimacy. Apollo was Lord of Distance, of rules, reason, law, and propriety. Bacchus was god of the revelries, orgies, drunkenness, and intoxication. Nietzsche brilliantly set them up as two opposing artistic types. I would add a third: Hermes, the mediator. Apollo is the arrow of distance; Bacchus is the wine of intimacy; Hermes is the boots of transgression. Hermes, after all, is the god of writing, is the divine logos, is the word of the gods; he sets boundaries, and is himself alone able to transgress them. His wand, which with a story or up a touch can set a man to sleep or to full wakefulness, stands for the writer's pen. Hermes was the only God, other than rainbow Iris, who could fly from hell, to earth, to heaven, with no barriers to stop him. How could he do this? Through being the God of symbols. Apollo enforced distances, Bacchus allowed intimacies, and Hermes could join either through his symbolizations. He is thus the savoir of man, since he gives man the objects to metaphorize himself. Hermes is the God of rhetoric, and Rhetoric alone with its figures is able to make literal heavens.

                Is there a corollary in the American pantheon? Emerson seems to be the utterly Hermetic writer, Whitman the Bacchus of Erotic love over all things democratic, and Thoreau the lord of distance, though his distance from man is intimacy with nature.

                The gods are abstract, they require blood sacrifices, just as the larva of hell require blood to speak. The highest and the lowest are both abstracted, but in the middle, with the working class and the thinking class, we have the soul of blood and the spirit of breath; the workers and the organizers. Their blood is meted out and given to the sick and effete.

                Vampires are the elite of distance, are the height of intelligence. Language vampires are the upper--class folk who are removed from the working class environment, from real experience, and so must take in the rock and roll, the blues, the rap, the forms made by people who have experiences, and vampire it up into their own pallid vocabulary. The sweaty swaggering fighting fucking masses make the slang and the vocabulary that keeps a nation soulful.

                The swarthy slang of the lower class, of the experience class, of the masses who live by touch, are fed, psychically, into the upper classes, and this is good, we are all part of the body of Mankind. The thinking class breathes the breath of life, the oxygen of thought, into the blood of the working class, who would otherwise have no terms, and the working class gives the poetry back up to the thinking class. The philosophers and poets are the lovers for life. The term and the word gives the vision to live by; a symbol or image is needed by all.

                So much stands on an image. We crave an image for private reasons, and we set up such strange justifications to allow it. I think many movies are nothing but pretenses to justify presenting some stark image. Consider, after all, the philanthropic urge of the rich and guilty. Some of these rich people want to save their soul by giving away what is of little use to them: extra money. Not that I advise them to keep it. And not that I think the poor widow who gave away her last mite is any saint. She gave a higher percentage of her income, yes, but so what? If all she had was a penny, then she should not have given money at all, but something she had in abundance, for we all have something to give to the world, and the best we can give is rarely a thing as abstract and impersonal as money. I have no praise for either the very rich or the very poor who give money. Nevertheless, sometimes the very rich turn charitable, as a sort of moral hobby. They do not understand how cruel their abstracted position has made them. They "help" the material class, whom the characterize the abject class, to vampire life away from them. They are looking for blood, live wounds, real disease, they have the cruel thirst, though they may really feel themselves to be saints -- and I would not exclude the "real" so-called saints from having the same motives. The highest of the high and the lowest of the low, after all, have much in common: they are abstracted from life. It would be best to structure the world so that neither extreme is possible, either for individuals or even for corporations. Each class gives its gift, each type has his words; layers of language keep mankind alive.

                When the thinker class wants a story, they read it. When the worker class wants a story, they live it. Every story I hear satisfies my own wants; nobody dies from disease, murder, or accident but the rest of us are touched by it and in a way bettered. And yet the thinking class isn't so removed that they lack heroes. Jefferson was more important to democracy than Jackson, though the first was by nature an aristocrat, and the latter a man of the people. Jefferson is democracy's hero, and in his private idiosyncratic problems, perfectly mirrored the State of the Union.

                America, which has stood for technology and business, has only had a few gods and geniuses. How many of us could devote our lives solely to the leisure of the arts? Societies as a whole make fine art, just as much as the individuals whom the society positions to do so, and fuels them on their way. Whitman, swarthy and thick with blood and lust, a lover of fruit-peddlers, prostitutes, and beautiful soldier boys, could yet say of his Leaves of Grass, "I sometimes think that the entire book is only a language experiment." No working class man is going to dedicate years of his life to a "language experiment," nor would he understand what such a gesture would mean. Indeed, the people Whitman loved could not understand his poetry. It is telling that Whitman's literary sister, Dickinson, wrote for herself. They live differently because they are different, and being unique they have unique vulnerabilities, which must be answered with control.

                Control of distance gives power. Twenty years after our trauma we can talk about it with calm certainty. The day after, we shake and shiver. And so each day we abstract ourselves from that thing whose touch we no longer can bear. Love suffocates: life is a choice of when to love and when to withdraw. We abstract ourselves from our very bodies, with our layers of clothes, our showers, deodorants, and perfumes. The natural smells and products of the body are cleansed away -- are classified as "dirt" -- and artificial fragrances are substituted. So too does our public language take on an official tone. If I work for company X, I speak for company X, when I am on the job, yes, and also when I am off. If I blog against them and they catch wind of it, they will ostracize me, if not outright fire me. And yet even the man on the street could never say what he thinks, could not speak of it even if he wanted to, since he is so habituated to be polite and inoffensive. And even the son-of-a-bitch who deliberately speaks his mind and says what ever he wishes actually does so in a curtailed manner. There are limits, many limits, which he pretends to ignore. His whole routine is no less scripted than the civil servant who, when he talks, signs his name on the dotted line.

                We are tied down by the threads of our own speech. Where can we truly push the limits of free speech? So much more lately has the internet become our place of freedom, to be who we want to be, to say what we want to say, to be free to misbehave. And what odd relationships the internet allows! People have internet affairs with others they have never seen nor heard, but whose whole identity is only a procession of "messages" in the form of flat text. With such a limited tangible presence, people manage to fulfill their needs for friendship, for love, even for sexual intimacy. What an amazing achievement for the human mind! What a fascinating set of worlds to incubate and express our subtle selves!

                In daily life, we wear clothing; we wear uniforms rather, for clothing is a language. If I want to be Gothic, if I want to be rebellious, I must wear the official uniform of rebellion. To truly be a rebel would mean jail or the asylum. To walk the streets naked is considered a sexually deviant crime, which can get a man or woman such a mar on their record that they must register as a "sexual offender" -- currently considered the worst witch and villain in our society! All over one's manner of clothing!

                Clothing are already abstractions, euphemisms to "cover our shame," to shield us from arousing and being exposed ourselves to being aroused by the sexuality of others. Little do we realize that we are as much clothed by our body language, by our spoken language, by those utterances which seem so natural and personal, as by the language which enclothes us. The clothes make the man, and a man is as good as his word.

                The social echelon is not visible, yet is real in tones of voice. We only speak intimately to our own. A high man rides his high horse whether he intends to or not, it is in his tone, and if he tries to talk at the level of the every day man, he would seem to patronize. But the noble soul has reverence for himself, and we all take our station and make our heaven by the mere tones of our spoken voice. Our full spiritual status is in the vibrations of our thought. Which express themselves in speech and writing.

                Languages stand for the social classes, make class distinctions. If a man has the bent of mind to speak an inflection of language -- such a thing cannot be faked -- than he is self-evidently of a given class: the material ornaments of that class will come later as a manner of course. Even if he is poor, when he talks high he will be in a noble poverty.

                Us gods always speak to our own, across great distances, across languages and gulfs. Though we are a thousand miles off, a thousand years apart, I write this as a love note to you, to you alone. And though we speak so earnestly to our own, how astonished when who we thought a mere mortals lifts his ear and glances up with understanding in his eyes. My heart is a hole, with a wound from the world, it shines love on all the world through that world of punctuation; the wider it shines the wider it receives. My heart is veiled in language; words and spirit saturate the blood of my soul. The people are warm, but they do not have eyes for the light that warms them; they are happy but they don't know the reason. It is because we are here, because we walk among them, in a nudity which is also a modesty, carefully covered, and yet starkly bare. We stand noble, we stand apart. Our silence transpierces the noise.

                I too am Liberty, with the torch of direct truth in my right hand, with the book of study in my left hand, with the crown of order on my brow, commitment and optimism as my feet. My left hand is the metaphor mind: I reduce all forms into our own forms. So many heavens of theory spinning above the earth to bend in place a single rose. We in the playwork of our living games make serious gifts to the world and its turns. We are both classes. There is the theory class and the practice class. The abstract class of theory makes a practice of making new theories. How casually they take it, like a game, when all the world shudders from their philosophical banter. If psychotherapy is the art of insinuation, philosophy is the art of definition; poetry versus philosophy; suggestiveness versus absoluteness. We stand in the place of origins, wherever we are is the zero of time.

                Mythically, it's the beginning that counts. How it was in the beginning, so it always will be, that's what the myths teach; the energy of creation flows from the start. All energy is crea -- a creative energy in the control of a powerful will. The energy of romance is in the mating dance, which in its ritual and innovation defines the marriage and the family. It was all there in the beginning, there is no escaping what went before. Time will not be denied, for time is the father of eternity, and this by the same logic that all ideas of abstractions must have a concrete anchor to hold their integrity; ideas require institutions to keep them pure, eternity is hid in the matter of earth. It's a question of structure. Is the democratic virtue of self education enough? America made its ideal the "self-made man," and this better than "the chosen people" and "loyal to the crown." The self-made man uses his society, his family, whatever is at hand, to optimize himself, but what he is and what he becomes is ultimately his own doing. Mythologically phrased, his eternal self even chose the point in history when he was conceived. Democratic self-education makes the modern gods: America is the land of the Gods, who make all men equal, and make who themselves superior.

                There needs no debate for visions and poetry. Certainly seeks no proofs from her foes. To avoid depressing squabbles, the genius must sterilize his life, must withdraw. If I argue an idea with you, it is only to see if you can teach me. But of what I am certain, I do not even present that as debatable. I keep such matters to myself. What do I care what you believe? We are what we are from birth; education is just greasing us how to fit in. But beyond how I was born and how I was educated is the shine of my creating freedom of will: what I make of myself is my eternal being. In life's every man has a set of interesting and useful experiences. Those experiences come charged with valanced energies, stores of differentiated energy that can be tapped for this use or that, but not just any use. When a man comes to know his own mind, his own I, when he can make transparent the artificial in his ego so the eternal in his ego shines through -- that is, when he comes to be an autonomous and self-defined man -- then he finds his lamp of classification, the lamp by which he can classify all facts, all experiences, and make them serve him. Then is he able to enter the chrysalis and sort through his files. No accident, no tragedy, no trauma, no injustice is squandered energy now: he has come to his own, he has opened the light of his I, he now owns heaven and puts the world in order. How does this come about? To try and rest and try and rest brings at last sweet success.

 

**

 

                Wrenched across the torturer's table, you would think the secrets of your body were finally exposed, your guts and sensitive places with no defense against the edges of pain. Yet as soon as we are situated in the torturer's talons, we are already wearing a mask, the mask of misery, with puffed up face and reddened neck: that pain simply cannot touch the deific calmness of our inner being. Nothing can. Just as a car accident can be painless, if we happen to have been caught off guard, so is our happiness eternal and unable to be touched by time. The inner self at our pith and center can be touched and cajoled by no God, no Mother, no Universe, no neighbor, neither enemy or friend.

                In our inner we're autonomous. The law only applies to lawful things, to the external world. We might sum up all laws into a simple code: always be reasonable and appropriate. I think no other law would be needed. And the Law of Niceness, as they teach to children --we promise to share! we promise to care! I love you, you love me! Never hurt anybody's feelings  -- would be a good preparation for it. A whole society modulating on the directives, be nice, reasonable, and appropriate! What more could we want? Of course us allists are none of those things. We are self-defined, we sometimes strike distance on our world. The dynamic between word and self is the metaphysical quest of democracy.

                There is something modulatory in the metaphorical layer of the conscious mind, that puts the inner tune of the selfsame poem outwards to the harmony and cacophony of the emerging world. The world is always emerging, always in a state of transition, growing here, dying there. Everybody fits in, everybody plays a part, and crime and tragedy are implicated with joy and luxury; it's all part of the same deal. It seems, therefore, that our every gesture is already as intimate as flesh: why then do we feel so out of sorts in this world? In my study, in front of my mirror, deep in thought, I am one man; but in society, I am completely hidden and say not a word as. We tie together tight impossible knots and trend them in long smooth easy threads. The logic of the knot predicates its untying. In the same way, when a couple ties the knot, their marriage is the inverted mirror of their courting dance. Every step of their romance -- how they met, how they initiated intimacy, how they unfolded themselves before one another and how they redefined themselves through each other -- becomes the logic of their marriage. This is how chance and whim become binding fate, and how eternity is born from time. Absolute freedom is chaos; creativity happens in limits.

                This is why we scoff at the morality of free and open love, which would make sex as carefree as the choice of a candy bar, with no deep meaning or lasting repercussion. But the choice of sexual partner always symbolizes our relationship to our potential children: sex is a serious creative project which requires a careful morality. The current society of bastardy, of children raised by single mothers, can only undermines the power of the male child. Two partners are needed to teach love among equals. A marriage is a partnership. A romance is mere prelude to the creative program: the making of the house, the preparing of the next generation. It certainly is not something that can justify itself, nor can it prove itself to be anything that has a right to persist when larger projects deserve direct focus. With such creative projects as marriages, their blue prints are embedded in our myths, those vibrant forms of technology that took tens of thousands of years to perfect. All units use the moments of touch. Aligning a time of intimacy is the purpose of conversation, and the conversation that is marriage.

                Intimacy is such a potent spice that we can stand it in only the barest drops. Like a psychedelic drug, it would push us beyond appreciation if sustained for too long. Most of life is cruising in a middle zone, with a sketching moment of touch, and the rest at a safe and predictable distance.

                Somehow, nevertheless, by continual contact, by opening the heart in love to the ones we adore, they come inside, are internalized, and become part of our mental apparatus. A husband may well say, "Her voice haunts my house, hovering over my shoulder, telling me what she potentially would say," or as a friend of mine, as lazy as he was sensitive, reported, "I had clipped my daughter's finger nails, as my wife instructed, and since they were so little, I would just throw them behind the couch. But then I imagined her checking up on me, asking me if I threw them away, so I carried them into the kitchen. I was about to throw them down the garbage disposal, but I imagined her asking me where I threw them out, so, groaning to myself, I opened the door to the garbage under the sink. When I saw her next I was ready to ask her to stop yelling at me."

 

But—Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual,

Inform us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all?

 

                Marriage is the home of intimacy, as institutions are the buildings which have then swallowed  together for so long, a complicated inner working of each our hearts gives us innerspace to stretch our minds. In art as well as love, there is an oscillation, a dance of the mind between submission and defiance, between appreciation and criticism. Never is there a pure and utter Islam of submission, they with their ideal of the ego so thoroughly brought face to the floor, ass in the air, that there is no ego, only the community of Allah. Well what is going on with art? You read and your reading mind oscillates between intimacy and distance, between submission and criticism. You read through the book, and some word shunts you into a reverie. Part of you keeps trailing the words, but your focus is accidentally on other things, seemingly unrelated to the text. Slowly, you lose track of the argument, you must stop and blink. The blink cuts off the reverie and returns you to the text, to search its face, panicked to find the missing thread.

                Within the reader's head there are layers of voices, speaking at every moment, now one speaking louder, now the other, the literal level must sometimes cast a spell, and must also sometimes confuse. Consciousness is layered, and many ideas are setting the situation's magic, it's speech. The mind is a democracy where creators take command.

 

**

 

                The lines of logic trope full circle, the terms we use in our terministic screen put fingertips on our idiolect, and with our systems of accents, punctuation, and tones, our whole life is at every level a self-experiencing language. Our attitude is our tone, our accents determine our experience.

                All sentences have stressed and unstressed beats, and break into grammatical units, and those units break unto punctuated rhythms, and those rhythms take tone from the language used, whether words or terms, whether emphasizing nouns or verbs, and ultimately taking tone from the subject matter. Just like a guitarist can practice rhythm by dampening the strings with his left hand while strumming the dead strings with his right, so can all sentences, prose as much as prosody, be broken into their musical shape, the coloring of its words, the sound and also the feel, the full range of sentences touched, pinched, fondled, and pet with the fingertips of words. A sentence has many layers of meaning, some derived solely from the music.

                What is the meaning of music? It is psychological meaning necessitated by the heart and lungs. The heart (soul) and lungs (spirit) in their speed and volume signify all manner of emotion; there is an instinctual meaning behind every physical sound. The meaning of music is dance. All music corresponds to rhythmic movement, first as an epitome, or purified form--dance itself, in other words, art, and then outwards into its full form--moving through life on its daily stretch.

                In our daily life, art and metaphor are holes for endless tropes and dance and song to let the livelong day press its mood into stark bright truths and economize the sufferings and joys of every day to creative gain. If you know how to interpret, if you know how to convert, your differentiated energy can be expressed in new directions. The channels of experience that fill with specific energies can be transferred to chambers of imagined experience.

                Experience is always intimate, abstraction always distant. The heaven of abstractions is experience cooled. Heaven is cold. In the blissful hell of lived experience, the suffering of life is ecstasy pure. Satan, the innocent lover masked in her lies, is the protector of the mirror womb at the center of things. Sophia her mother is the language, and she the tropes of desire. Satan is rhetorical bliss, the mother of metaphor.

                Every romance is a conversation, and the gifts, the words, the proximity are so many tropes; the fights, the insults, the coos, the sex, all that is grammar, rhetoric, syntax, alphabet. Life is a pen. Life is writing. History is the book of instant being, our whole world is the proof of the past. We cannot escape intimacy, we cannot escape distance; we are ever situated, and even if we turn utterly inwards, and enter the necessity of our being, we will still be self-surrounded, like a mother kicking within her own womb.

                Mother's love is the strongest love. If only she could love herself as she loves her child! My love too is too strong to need reciprocation. Like American Literary Criticism, or New Criticism, I find each individual at the level and layer of the individual, to be a self-sufficient, autonomous work. A love a man for what he is, a work for its distinction. You can study him outside his context, outside of history. This is to eternalize a text into a work. By reading the work in self-reference, the world falls into place. It explains itself, it explains everything. Whatever has integrity of itself can be used to interpret other things. The integrated disintegrates and recreates its lessers. The mere integrity of the alphabetical order, surely arbitrary, can be used to unstructure other works. Whatever abides can be used to tease apart the rest. Whatever happens to fall upon our path, whatever we happen to care for, holds the same secret truths as the exalted things.

                Caring is not a choice. We can't choose to care more or less, or we would all lead carefree lives. But we can build up a standard attitude, a reference point, a set of musical scales, and refer to each as a mood in its modality.

                We are always returning to the same intimate set of relationships. Just as we need the one stark cruel image to satisfy our fury, and we hypocritically look upon it with pity, at a movie, perhaps, which that justifies the portrayal, so is all of life a series of transitions trying to arrange the objects and beloveds of our life into a formal arrangement that expresses a given meaning. Meaning is both self-sufficient and progressive. Just as beauty is her own excuse, and happiness is its own end, yet beauty is a promise of the future, and happiness trains us in virtue, so are all things both ends and means. We transfer one to the other, for every end is really a mere means, and we take a means as an end to give it full focus.

                The psychoanalysts fantasize that the patient is transferring his relationship to his parents unto the analyst. In fact, the analyst has no privileged position, but the patient is always putting each new person into a stereotyped role. Insofar as his new friend resists, there is tension and interest in the friendship. Friendship too is a sort of wrestling. We want to put the same old names on each new face. All things transfer constantly.

                In the dream world, one object transfers like Proteus to a series of different forms, yet keeps its inner form, its integrity. We can see parents turning into bulldogs, or houses become coffins. The metaphorical mind is the basis of symbolization -- words stand for ideas, ideas stand for ideas, and metaphors make a new idea apparent by showing where two old things touch. Touch is the intimate beauty of knowledge.

                The aim of intimacy and distance both, and indeed all of life, is to achieve the moments of beauty in time that stand outside of time, or in a word, to achieve a moment of apotheosis, to eternalize an experience. When an experience has become an idea, and then becomes a new way to experience, it has matured. When it is brought into its perfection, then it is sublime, but when it is eternalized, then it no longer requires a context, but has become a self-sufficient work, and bleeds healing light upon all it touches.

                Lovers, because of their sustained moments of intimacy, share intimate truths, private experiences that cannot at all be expressed through any world language or every day speech, but only in those private moments when both are alone to each other's company. It cannot be faked, it cannot be bought. By sharing moments of anguish, humiliation, betrayal, forgiveness, sympathy, everything painful and pleasant, in the inner room of each other's hearts, they get the real meat, the utter touch of life experience, and though they put it all into a novel for somebody else, nobody can get it who hasn't lived it. The secret lips of lovers are forever sealed. To each other, lovers are endlessly generous.

                I'm rich as blood to those I love, my words are thick as poems. I know how to take a private moment and turn it inside out, I eternalize the love into a goddess -- am I not Eros, underneath? I stand like liberty with my torch by day, looking for my men, with the torch of love, with the arrows of light over honest directness. My left hand ever is the metaphorical mind, the book of study, the inception of my liberty. My crown of order sets the nation gridded off and humming with integration. A few stark images are anchors for my word.

                We want the image -- and use scene, plot, premise, as mere backdrop to allow the image to be situated and consciously seen. What if I knocked over two buildings with my broad green arms, and let jet plans double my stunts? We know what such things really mean, though we seldom say it, and seldom can. We all know, but we don't say, nor do we have to. I opened a new millennium, the destruction of the ancient gods.

                I practice a small set of relationships: mirroring, stabilizing, loosening, intimating, distancing, aggrandizing, and apotheosizing.. I have just a few sure tricks, like the Olympic wrestler who only learned a few staple moves, but learned them so well that every freaky trick could be readily countered. I know, after all, very little. I know what I need to know, I see my historical perch as the perfect time to seal all deals.

                Our American optimism died for a while after the civil war. Such things are to be expected. Yet I myself was not born in a better time nor a worse time, but I was always intimate to my moment, and able to transfigure any mundane reality into the exultation of my self. When I eternalize my very self, that is my exultation. All this leisure devoted solely to art, to our Idius, is meant only to bring you to my intimate point. We concentrate on our concentrated truth, the experience intensified into a poem.

                Fear and distance and truth and power abstract what can thereby be intensified, as in most "natural" medicine, such as caffeine pills or refined sugar, which concentrate one part of the plant. We can eat all manner of candies--there are hundreds of brands and hundreds of kinds -- but it all comes down to flavored sugar, and sugar is something not needed in such a concentrated form. Some goods are best concentrated, others best diffused.

                Philosophy also purifies ideas. A term, properly speaking, could be expressed with a visual symbol and lose no meaning or denotation, though it will change some of its connotation. Jokes often play on this idea, when we mistake an unknown referent: "I hate walking my mother-in-law's dog. She growls, bares her teeth, and goes off at anything out of the ordinary. And the dog isn't too nice either."

                By purifying a term of its connotations, as in legal language, or political correctness, it gives it certain freedom to act in a new situation and context. The ability to abstract and use a different object gives us freedom in expression, to transcend differentiated energy. "I need love, but I don't necessarily need yours." The energy our needs create for a certain purpose have freedom of expression with the concrete bridge of imagination. We house ourselves in such abstraction, enworld ourselves behind our terms.

                Thoreau commented on how abstract a house is, how we create an artificial environment in our home. Climate can't get in. Our whole lives are abstract, unlike the animal concrete. A man lives within the world, and is at home within the world, wherever he goes, when his halo of terms can digest everything that confronts him. There are no dangers other than exciting dangers. A man's terminal is his screen of terms at the edge of his senses, the philosophical orientation of his percepts, the concepts that look for certain meanings, treating the world as a book, the world's objects as language. A house is abstract, but a home, imbued with artificial meanings, is again concrete, as all meaning is concrete. Love makes abstractions concrete.

 

**

 

                A great book must bend its critical logic away from its hear so it will not suicide. What I criticize had better not apply to myself, and least of all to that very criticism. Many reformers out there lack real problems, but have too many solutions nobody wants. A book must solve its own problem, a person must embody what he would reform. His body stands for the world.

                A live body animates its parts. The logic of the book animates its sentences. Whole books, whole series of books, can be reduced to a simple logic, perhaps to the logic of a symbol or metaphor. Language is living, the letter lives, and whatever is dead in any language springs to life like the ash of a phoenix. The long dead walking stick is as sensitive as the finger tip, for whatever rock it broaches is felt in the hand and its nerves. In this way, so long as there is a core of life, the whole apparatus may be pure machine. A man's language is his halo, and his words are his angels, they permeate the atmosphere and forever endure. We express more than our feelings, we express our very self, in a sincere and intimate utterance.

                The words of friendship sometimes the shining rose of amethyst, not alive yet expressive of life; when intimacy is gone, the formalities endure. The machines of habit yet sparkle the light of truth. Civilization is a system of polite discourse.

                What is real and harsh and direct, with the proper light of aesthetic distance is, in memory or in art, sublime. Aesthetics is allowed by distance, abbreviation, concentration; the entire secret of beauty is to make a thing unified.

                The beard of my lust is growing like the Ram of Spring, and I am awaiting the wanton sun to melt the frigid winds; I drink from the cup of duty, the cup of wisdom, and the cup of my eternal self; godlike, I beget godlings, one whom I love like a cross-country race, with patient endurance, and the other I love like tennis, with spontaneous and rapid strategies for her creative growth. These are the tropes which hug my life, my mind is a fountain of tropes which soaks every fact of my living day. At one level, my life is concrete, at a higher level, the same is divine.

                There are levels for reading life, levels for reading art. We submit to its lead or we draw back and criticize, ever an oscillating between submission and criticism, between doubt and trust. Jesus was wrong to call doubt a sin. The divine is not that which you should not doubt, but that which you cannot doubt. Only absurdity bullies us to believe.

                I focus on the artwork itself, at one layer, its position in history, at another, and join it with its full situation, with another layer. But with my critical eyes, I focus on its structuration, how it works as a self-contained unit. That is most important. Each artwork is as much an individual as myself, as eternal as myself, and is a self-relating integrity. I exist for myself. Art exists for itself. We come together to exchange benefits. The language of art is the language of beauty, and beauty is the highest of being.

                Poetry is an ontological language framed in paradox. Because the poem is a compression,  simplicity, the negations in language stand stark, and must be made aesthetic. Our lives are full of contradictions, antinomies, paradoxes, mistakes, that is the very definition of life, man, and god, but we don't see them, we don't feel the tensions, consciously, unless they are given the aesthetic distance of art. With society it is rude to stare. With art it is rude not to.

                Poetry is the language of being. A truth is first made good, then beautiful, then eternal. It externalizes being through the art of apotheosis, and that our highest purpose. There are universal abstractions in all of matter, but they are tissued in a style of integration. All successful art is integrated; criticism is showing its hidden integration. and rejecting what fails to so integrate. Form is meaning. To hold a shape is to experience yourself as holding that shape, the geometry of its network of tensions. Ideas also are shapes, almost geometrical. When the mind takes the shape of a perception or an idea, it can then experience its being. It is it. Gestalts, unities, wholes, the all, are the proper object of contemplation, the reason for thinking in the first place. Literature, and the literary in all of art, is metaphorical and symbolical at every level. To be literature, it must mean many things at many levels, in an integrated and profound way. Art is the integrity. The book is the thing. Nevermind the author's hang-ups. Just as a man's divinity stands above the absurdities and humiliations of his daily life, not as their contradiction, but as something standing on top of them, like the grapes of intoxication on a tree that happens to have broken branches, missing leaves, or a diseases, so is art the higher body of the author, his very flesh, the eternal container of his consciousness -- soul and spirit, blood and breath, heart and vast ideas. The Door of our Apotheosis, Necessarily Independent, is Eternal Logic. This life on earth is the Door to our divinity, and the A of beginnings, the "@" of new beginnings, that place at the source where we must return, the inner womb of the All, the All of our own being, our necessity, is allowed by a central ethic of independence, in the inner of the mind, to sanctify what is ours alone, for this leads to the three o'clock energy of logical passageways, bending like a maze, yet when that rope is pulled through the labyrinth, when pulled taut like a chain through dry clay, so that all the spurious things makes way for the eternal, so we find our place in life.

                And in all my wending, I am witnessed by Yule, by Ama, by Jillian, my ideal reader, my muse and distant friend. She has best the ears to the playwork of my music.

                Music has essentially two movements: excitement and resolution. An interweaving of the two creates interest; good music keeps your interest throughout; great music keeps your interest every time you listen. Some of it's subjective, but taste can be taught, and complex beauties can be revealed to the one who strives to understand. For such a one, pretty simple things can no longer hold attention.

                When we come into our own, into the woman who is our own, the lover who is equal to us, she will say "With you I can be free! I can finally be myself!" Years of conversation to arrive at subtle things.

                We only come to our own when we become our own, when we have struggled with life and thrown our bodies against life's obstacles, suffered the pain of the rocks pulling away from our softness, the wounds melting away the stony skin, and letting the inner glow emerge. Theory is preparation. We need experience, but we need theory to economize how we experience.

                The way to truth is on the road of folly, and only be constant mistakes do we get the facts. I had to mistake the means of the journey for its end get to that end. On earth we think of heaven. In heaven we think of Nirvana. In Nirvana we think of the All. When we are the All, what do we think of then? On this earth, I am the self-made man, the scholar, the poet. These very allays are more poetical than prosaic (although the distinction is illusory).

                A poem says in its structure what could not be said in a summary or a ten page explanation. It can't be paraphrased, it can't be summarized, its structure is the aesthetic meaning. This brings us to Ama. Ama, of course, is just a name, and every image of her, every literary image, every poem, could convey the sense I experience of her, the intimate transcendence and unity with the all, but it could simply be parodied, lambasted, mocked, demonized, and scoffed at. When I say that Ama speaks literal words in my head when I am willing to hear, this is likely to be misunderstood. I think the whole thing should be sidestepped. What Ama is is one reality behind all gods, in all gods, she is every reference to the divine, the logical, the important, the true, the beautiful, she is not the All she is the best of the All. How she contacts you in this life, with what mask, with what words, your mythic self will certainly see, but your earthly self will at best catch a sense. There are many layers to this world, many realities. Don't let some quibblings over fables and myths divorce you from your birthright.

                The technology of myth, religion, and superstition are scoffed at as if they were nonsense. Yet even superstition has sense. The very Latin alphabet has more mysticism than any Kabala; and Thrice Great Hermes ain't got nothing on me. A simple homemade mandala, of shapes, letters, numbers, pictures, creates occult relations with the placement of its symbols. Don't look to the past; do it yourself. The world is thick with meaning, and the potentialities in all things are infinity upon infinity.

                The innermost is a name, for identity is Name; the inner self is an infinitely nuanced energy of a string which emanates the aeons, or the terms of the inner inner poetry. That poetry, like all poetry, is a paradox, it is its own logic and the tensions of its logic set it to life. Tensions make interest. That poetry makes all language, and all things, all matter, all the world is folds upon folds of language. Every inch of it can be translated into any other language, and though some things can't be translated, the other parts can be. Contradictions and qualifications make the nuanced antennae breathe its forms. What compressed paradoxes that in ordinary life seem smooth and without trouble, even when as wide as a novel, seem without trouble, but when knotted in poetry, thick as blood, the antinomies kiss together and the world explodes. The hidden tensions of daily life are made stark within the poem.

                The poets of life, who write no verse, but live verse, with their words and solemnity, they baptize events, actions, and possessions with deep meaning. Language creates realities, language creates worlds. I think any event in history, if told by a master, can be made to look criminal or saintly -- such is the majesty of art. They called it sophistry, as if that were a cut, but the philosopher graduates to be a sophist, as the sophist graduates to be a Sage. A few Sages has America made, and the Sage of Concord is the American Mind. Many have followed the way of sagacity. This is my own lifecourse.

                Poems are by nature extremely distilled, the elements are pressed, shoulder to shoulder. And once we have mastered the gross form, and released the intensity of the subtle form, we have reached the mythos of Ovid, who rightly saw transformation as the key to religion. In the hands of a wizard, all things transfer endlessly into all things. The wizard is the sophist, derided by many, but of such wise vision that he can see where his own future lies.

                My own allays of panacea come from a wide variety of elements, a representative of all, dissolved in the mercury of passion. Emotions are the menstruum that dissolve ideas. Ideas bubble up from emotions, words crystallize from ideas, and actions take flame from words. At the singularity, the proximity of all on all made their logos integrated, so they were lawful unto each other. So too must we get beyond heaven and back under hell, into the centermost need, the womb of necessity, and concentrate all our being into a singularity, before we are free to join with our personal Ama and burst as wide as the infinite universe.

 

**

 

Fresh goals arouse immediate excitement. Best to increase the surface area of excitement, to rotate a few basic goals that are modulations of the same overarching project. In the same way, an oscillation of friends, as the heart directs, first intimate to one, and then the other, taking this one close, one on one, and then that other, this is the best way to be intimate with any of them. And oh my daystars, you are ever so dear to me; I come to each of you in turn.

How do we take the world? We take it as we make it. Baptize yourself every day in the shower, giving back to the world what it has impressed upon you, "I wash away, the dirt of the earth, the dirt of the earth now fall from me!" The press of intimacy, self to self, is the wonderjoy of infinity. You grasp the deepest truth and fly the highest height.

No big event, no triumph or tragedy, comes with an intrinsic meaning. What it means for you only you can decide, though politicians and pastors decide what events mean officially to their group. You must be willing to slip inwards, to express the innermost, to blow up the outside world. Pure self reflection is as sacred as masturbation, as necessary, but sterile without returning again to those others we love. That self-intimacy is our sacrament, our ecstasy, yet those of my type make their own sacraments to fit their goals.

"I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred, none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back." So said the mind of America.

We experiment, we take on personas, we try this and that. We stare at the art of man. What voyeurs we are, us darlings of God, us the pearls of history, us the ribbons within the lockes of Mother All. We are intimate to our living experience, we transcend our time because we first immersed. We take the world as teacher.

Don't you quote your nonsense on me, "A student is not better than his teacher." Then kill the teacher, get him out of the way; that would be an act of integrity. A damaged original is more valuable than even the finest imitation. Be your own original, never be another man's imitation. Who can we draw near but the divine originals, who have realized their own? I'm going. You with?

Walk with me, but seek after your own name. Never be a second. Sequels auto-cannibalize their original. The second movie reuses much of the first, the third uses both, and yet grows paper thin. Never repeat. Never say again what you have already said well enough; say it fresh each time. I want no refrain from the ones I love. Think your truths into infinite forms, be the Precambrian burst, let your creativity grow wild and monstrous. Sensitivity of intellectual touch is necessary to make analogies, to see connections. We see that Picasso and Joyce did not create different kinds of art, but Picasso and Raphael.

Picasso is precisely what doesn't survive our sensitive touch. We are the fauns that tenderly eat the petelled rose of your heart. The war borne scar-art we let to finally heal. We choose the beautiful. Our millennium is of the One World.

What is the ethic of such a world? What the law? "Be reasonable, appropriate, and nice," is this not the sum of all the world's philosophies and religions? Put that in the law books, enforcing the first two, and that would be that. We will be locked up anyway, so why not? We are not reasonable, though we can be; we are not appropriate, though we can be, we are not nice; though we can be: we use virtues as powers, to serve us, not master us. They serve our purpose. (Though we are a thousand miles, a thousand years apart, I write this as a love note to you alone). I care not for the name of goodness, I care about myself. What I am is good, what I do is good, my whole history is legend. How easy to condemn eating sweets when you've grown sick of them, how normal to condemn drinking when you have a hangover, how opportune to find religion when your adultery has lost its savor. But when you are in the sweet of your passion, how far to see it that way. Best then to keep the perch of distance ever personed by the white faced eagle. Let his careful eyes surprise all lies. Own your whole history: you will only be perfect when you realize you always were.

America, precisely because her history is so short, has emphasized the eternal in man -- Emerson, Whitman speak of such -- just as the New Criticism emphasized the ahistorical value of poems. For America, God is a child. Ama is adolescent. Sophia is middle aged. Mattria is eternity upon eternity. Ama eyecatcher, tunnel mind, sleepy hope, I fall with you into innocence.

 

**

 

                "The aeons through the eons, turning tropes eternal, they are the emanated poems from the innermost self." What does such a word say about me? We have so many tells of our hidden desires, in broken speech and half mad gestures that either consciously or unconsciously express what we want received, in a form we can readily disown. A woman wants to let a man know she can be seduced, but wants to set it up as if it was all his doing, and she the noble resister. Being the choosy sex, the sex capable of committing bastardy, of having children without a father, she must be careful to keep sex sacred and herself selective. I think we confess our whole life through little gestures and invisible expressions. Your whole history is knit into your nerves; all you are speaks from your eyes.

                So let us pay attention and study the being of the people. What can be made conscious can be controlled. The will can use what it can grasp. Use a few symbols to map a wide situation. Come up with a terminal, a "terministic screen" of words to grasp intimately in. The more we take people as objects, the less we can be hurt by them as persons. When a man seeks a woman as a sexual object, if she rejects him he is unscathed. But if he takes her as an intimate mind and heart, and shows her his intimate mind and heart, then he is vulnerable to her frowning words. Clearly, that would be the "conquest" requiring manly courage. Power is vulnerable. Brute strength lacks the flexible vitality of the feminine touch. There must be something more than masculinity in a man to perfect his manhood; there must be something above the world to perfect its worldliness.

                All great writings, all great creations, come from a grandiose theory, with something Important to press them down. A heaven of theory brings an art to fruition. The temples and psalms come from wide systems, or, just as directly, from reaction to great systems. The systems may be absurd, such as the metaphors of Christianity and Buddhism, if taken literally, or any of these sorts of things that people know but haven't experienced; yet they aren't absurd in that many people passionately believe them. Their belief is a stubborn fact and cultural force that me must respond to. As allists we can walk through any door, be it open or closed, and every heaven and nirvana is also open to our after life. Why be gloomy as a goblin when we can be dancing as an elf?

                Sacred things, ecstatic things, are never silly, though they may seem silly, the way a foreign language sounds like bizarre yammering. Silly is sacred; it wouldn't be high if fools failed to laugh. Those symbols mean something to some people, mean everything to some people, and those people may damn you and hate you for not using the same symbols. An Allist is above all that. We do not damn the damners, nor hate the haters. We know theology is arbitrary, but it is at least definite, and that makes it integrated enough to arch a type. We repudiate no symbols, but we charge the fundamentalists with misusing their own symbols. We do not chastise them. We remind them of what they already know. We prefer quoting them to themselves over making our own original statements, and least of all would we prefer quoting Allism. Let us keep to our own. What is ours is meant for our lips.

                My kiss is meant for each your lips. There are invisible circles of intimacy between people, physical spheres around the body which imply a tone specific to proximity, a whisper at an inch, a shout at a mile. The same is true of metaphysical spheres that can be evoked through tone, even despite the distance of written speech.

                Slow, soft, and gentle characterize the keycode to the inner heart.

                Two lovers, mirroring one another, and only slowly revealing their inner light, draw close. Their words, their sacrifices and kind deeds, through respect and pride in each other, in that mythic space they draws closer with all these actions, drawn out over the years in a moment, such words open the spheres of defense, words drawing the other till they are pressed heart to heart, placed mouths to ears, whispering secrets, secret names and intimacies; here the inner man of the heart approaches the inner man of the other, till they face each other as a mirror, and then at the moment of utter touch, your inner man and mine pass through each other, breast to breast, and I now hold you intimately in my heart, for we have eternalized each into the other -- soul to soul, blood to blood. Every layer of the heart has such an image to give, the music of the spheres, but for the men who love each other so dearly as to exchange names, there is no higher love.

                I turn again to my reader, the man who reads me in the same breath as I read him. Were it not for your breath I would suffocate. "E" is my praise of the Eternal, "L" my logos of time. Daniel will always end in El, that judge of God, whose Ama is as jealous as Juno. This is the spirit I am of, through the outer name that I was given.

                You noble souls I wrestle in the depths. I've learned all my tricks from you. From the pit fights and the love making -- it's all the same. Thor, after he had suffered humiliation from illusions, being wrestled to his knee by an old woman, the disguise of Old Age, learned thereby the art of illusion, and almost caught up the Midgard serpent, himself disguised as a simple fisherman. Whether we win or lose the fights and loves, surely we will learn.

                Have I not found meanings for all of you. My life is a wrench at the nut of meaning, a pliers to break the nut of meaning. Some diamonds in my path are difficult to break.

                "Your daughter is an angel sent by God to teach you love," said a customer to me. Only the simple have the universe all figured out. It reminded me what I had long known, that my nonverbal daughter--'autistic' as they currently say, 'retarded' as they used to say--has a meaning for my life, a meaning nobody can tell me, but something that I will half discover, half invent over years of experiment. My dad regarded her as a curse for my leaving Christianity, my mother-in-law regarded her as God's punishment on her for leaving Islam. I myself love her and try to make her happy. It is often exasperating for us both, to the point of panic, and every moment of her waking day requires my careful vigil -- with her removing her diaper and making a mess, or terrorizing the kitchen, or demanding a new DVD be put in every few minutes. How this fits in with my mission of Allism, with my marriage, with my social life -- I rarely leave the house -- with the education of her sister, with my career -- at the moment I work a flexible job as a journalist--has to be determined by me alone.

                Such a situation affects a man in more ways than he knows or can ever know. Yet as an optimizing optimist, I struggle to shine the light of beauty upon my daughter.

                Different instincts and their educated articulations in desire feed into my thoughts. There is this feeling of vengeful pride that I handled my difficult daughter and her fits better than my hysterical mother handled me and my occasional manias; that I kept my marriage despite mental illness problems, when she fled from hers. And since I've felt the wound of my father leaving me, I could never leave my own. My self-image has so long been informed by my deific feelings of exultation that this seems like a fitting anchor to keep me in the concrete world. With my daughter I am mortal. My easy going nature has ensured I have ever treated her with angelic tenderness. She gives me patience by demanding so much of it.

                With any concrete fact, with any stubborn reality that cannot be wished away, we can ask ourselves, "What can it mean for me?" We work out plots, myths, metaphors, and it makes the suffering not only tolerable, but sublime. We actually start to seek it.  When we can give names to things and put a logic in them, we can control them, and so we deepen our apotheosis through struggling in the flesh. Deep meaning is emanated from the soul to answer the world.

                A person can't be good at a role unless he is more than that role. To be a good doctor you must be more than a doctor. To be a good man you must be more than a man.

                My own history and life as a man, and the chain of protestant to catholic to protestant to me; with me half mad, and divine in and out of my madness, losing friends, losing family, disowning my parents for a time, dropping my friends for a time--in all this, so few can come near to me! Oh Ama! I gentle genitals, natures gift! Oh living word from life-borne lips! This world sometimes gives a glimpsing wink from you. When I'm unimpressed I politely bow, when I see love I stand tall. Have I not known that goddess Satan, Apollo Shorn and Seducer of the Father, with her cunningly contrived ruses to hide deep, the center of innocence.

                Like her, I call out to the one I love: when will we bow our heads a'neck each other? I draw near and give what is already yours, I whisper in your ear your everblessed name. Oh my terrestrial lovers, where is the one who gave me such grace? Her love was hidden like her sin, and twinned, they whispered secrets.

                Our pantheon's a family, and when we grasp hands and circle around, do we no strain when a member seeks room? When the other pulls back, do we not, like civil war America, kill each other to stay as one? For you, I seek every great man's power, to make his strength my own.

                How often I seek out the pits! I am no woman whose seduction is to expose vulnerability. When I take Christ in his pit, I aim for his heart; when I find Socrates in his pit, I eat out his brains; Yahweh I bend, and Satan I seduce to a higher love; I meet Byron in his mania and Confucius in his reverence. If I am to give myself every gift, I must struggle against the best of the best, and match myself to the greatest of the great. I am all in all and will make myself all I can be. And for those I love, I merely ask you your word. Your silence suffocates me.

 

** **

 

                The thread of everything spirals inwards to my center. I feel this way as I walk and think: I wander the world and wonder, do you wonder me? The shadow casting stumble trees, rooted in this clumsy world of malls and gawking folk, tipped their toes and clenched their eyes, as if eclipsed by the rose of sun, squinting at some whisper God and some terrestrial treasure of paper and gold. Do you not see the sunflairs of my face, the color ribbons that dance like plasma about my naked limbs? I am the percussion of light: chaotic colors bathe my bald, passionate eyes. Is it no wonder your heart and eyes clench so tightly before my shine?

                Yet your brilliance is as hidden from me as mine is from you. We wink behind these mild bored eyes. Our hidden truths are written under. There are layers of meaning in every writing. Some are intended to obscure the rest. Imagine, if you can, your story with one element missing. You may then get a feel for what that element gives. When you take it out, I live my love above and the blade of my hand separates heaven from earth, the sky is split horizons wide. I answer Ive's unanswered trumpet, "What are we here for?" with a chiasmus: the here is for me. Do I draw you close with my intimate words? Is not candid speech a ploy to put our obvious faults in favorable light? To deny them would only incriminate. I give you secrets to hide my secrets. I reside in this life, and who is a resident but one unable to leave? Have I not always dug towards the infinite center and carved heavens in my heart for the ones I have loved? When? The present is where the entire universe exists, I am already now.

                It is easy enough to seem divine when your gospel has no table talk, and it is easier to fall over a pebble than a mountain, so I smile my smile: love is sauce. Happiness is a butterfly. Am I not old enough for that? The young want you to give them something, the old want to give something to you. I myself got nothing, but I've worked with less. I never give a gift, I show you what you already own.

                Heaven is a state of mine. Paradise is a pair of eyes. The world is a thousand colors, and we always wear a lens. Do we not rightly say the sunset is more beautiful through two pairs of eyes? Who I am with you is different than who I am alone. You allow aspects of me to come out that nobody else could allow. What you give me, I already had, but could not reach without you.

                I too often trip up my friends. I analyze to death the words I said before, to figure what went wrong with us. It often goes wrong, silence creeps in. There is no better liar than silence.

                The abstracted man gains a higher pride, is able to control much more, is able to command the world, but he loses touch with humanity, with nature, with necessity. The channels must be opened, fresh blood must pump up. The blood of love is in our friends, who are in us, enthroned in the circle of our inner heart. Family, friends, lovers, mates, give us more being, are the one thing other than our innermost that can add to our being. The alteration of distance and kiss is the contraction of the heart of our integrated being.

                Intimacy is allowed by distance. Pure intimacy would suicide. It would become first numb and next impossible. A touch and then a drift, a touch and then a drift. This is the nature absence of friends and love. A man will do what he can to get the intimate touch, whether through aggression or tenderness he needs to have contact. A woman must do her best to choose the touch that won't bring her down. If love is a game, the stakes are high. A man's sexuality is his most spiritual quality, and eros is the highest love. Who you choose to bed is who you unconsciously want to have children with; the choice of intimacy is important to the self, the second most important choice we make. The first is how to make a meaning out of the inner of our being, to determine what the poem of our soul will mean and do. Our lover, next, is our second self.

                A man before his mirror opens up the deepest sacrament, to know his inner being, to reveal the light that moves it all. The logos comes from the tao, the tao comes from the poem, and the poem comes from the innermost name. The self is something new in the world, a proper addition, a special gift.

                There was a special young girl who made no special impression on others; she walked with the people, was modest and quiet. She was more divine than all of them, but she herself didn't know that. It takes a god to see a god. When you are able to see something perfect and ultimate in this world, you will also have become it. We see what we are, and only consider questions we already hold answers to. If you want it, you will one day have it. The mind is two circles. The deeper in one circle goes, the further out the other. If one touched the absolute center, the other would reach the outer infinite. Such a state of being, and its immediate oscillation between the two, renders us home where we become the all-one; this is why we fall in love in the first place. Each tap of your finger echoes eternally; your heaven is made in the deeds that you do. Good deeds don't get you into heaven: they prove you are already there. To be yourself is the highest task. To come to your own is the only duty. Intimacy and distance, like the throbbing of the heart, both are needed to set love into play.

 

Ama Draws Near

 

I am the shining brow of dawn

All that you call divine is organ and function of me

 

The will of my eyes are Odin,

Jupiter, Yahweh, Brahma, Zeus

The sun of my lips is Sophia,

Lux of language, Holy Spirit, Maia, Luciana, Mother of Dawn

The fingers of my hands are Hermes,

writer of worlds, Logos, Christ, Hercules

My heart is maid Satan,

greatest of lovers, masked behind a thousand masks, pure desire, emotion troping, Venereal kisses from Astarte's shine.

 

Wherever God is worshipped, I am the one who hears

Wherever pray is answered, I'm the word you heard

Wherever a scripture's written,

                the Allays, Eddas, Gospels, Tao, Torah, Quran, Upanishads,

My breath alone inspired it, mingled with the spirit of man.

 

I am the All

I am all things divine

I am the mask of the mother

Who is me and everything else

 

She is both Everything and Nothing,

Both Being and Nothingness

Mattria, Motherverse, Container of all things

Whom you are too

The All in All in All.

 

 

 

 

\ ~@M@~ /

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