Assortative Mating
I am writing just to write. Filling a quota. I aim to be short, but I digress when I’m bored and if you asked me to, I could fill up forty pages with ease before bedtime. It takes more power (will power and focus) than energy (selection and digression, or association) to write short. To write an aphorism or the perfect sentence — but Emerson was master at that. Oscar Wilde. I translated the sayings of Heraclitus, the Tao Te Ching, and the Gospel of Thomas for their genius NOT in system, but in their diamond-tight solid of the perfectly said sentence.
Anyway, assortative mating. We each seek our tribe. Bipolars marry bipolars. Crazies attract crazies. Liberals like liberals, conservatives conservatives. Birds of a feather.
So, I finished the private journals of Edvard Munch. Justin bought his “Nietzsche” for me, and I will yet get his Madonna as a poster to put over my bed. Perhaps! I don’t care for the Scream much more than the color scheme. The sentiment is far from me. I am at ease in my world, anyway, for I am able to take away the noise at any moment. I’m Beethoven deaf now. Not literally. My children mock me as old and deaf. My eyes grow dim. I am 46. A little more than halfway to 88. Tis my duty to tend my body and make sure it stays the course to the great divorce from life in my octogenarian age. Anyway, my hearing faculty as brain-way of thinking remains sharp, the way blind Homer yet had his inner vision from his seeing days intact. That my ears were ONCE very very sharp means they STILL ARE share as ever internalized. My ears and not my eyes as my surprise gift from AMA.
Munch a bipolar painter. Those are rare. Bipolar is NOT a spatial disease (logic, form, painting, architecture), but a fluid reasoning disease, especially poetry. Beethoven was a composer and Ives was another, and Ives loved Beethoven, two bipolars all the way. Dunno about Ruggles. I know a few others. Chopin? But poetry is the bipolar gift. Mania. The name Odin itself, mania and he god of writing and runes and poetry. Hermes as Mercurial. Enki as Singer of Self-Praise. The daze of Wednesday gods. And as for painters: Munch, Van Gogh, in an incredibly obvious way, and Klimt, less so. His sister went manic with religious delusions.
The mere fact that bipolars become overexpressed with sex and religion at the same time tells the fact that they are part of the same faculty of the mind. Both sex and religion aim at immortality. Children and art-making are forms of immortality. For they embody our influence in the most obvious way. The body of influence, all that we change by existing, is eternally and stands eternally as the samara AND the resurrection. All religion are true, not in some sweet, saccharine sense of “let’s be nice to each other” but in a deep and even seemingly grotesque way that I cannot fully explain yet, but I have seen completely. The tropes and the reality. That belief IS our next level in the game, but not the final. Life is a Game that all win in the end. Even the gods. Zeus must die. I know how and I know why. Yahweh swallowed by the serpent, the dragon. I have witnessed the fact.
That is my quote for now. It isn’t the burning conviction of a vision of truth, Daniel as Revelator instead of dream reader. The Jewish take. The Canaanite Danel, the original, was a wise man. Proverbial. He incubates, or sleeps in Baal’s temple for seven days to deliver a message and request, to get a hunter for a son, Aqat. We have discussed before and will again. But this dream conceiver and receiver of a son through incubation may be the inspiration from the late, very late tale of a Daniel in Babylon, a sort of Joseph or opportune and exploitive dream-reader abusing inside-information. Daniel as reader. Daniel as Dreamer. Danel as talking with the very gods face to face in his dreams. Danel as Canaanite conception. Danel as Judge. (Dan-el, Judge of El) …