A long essay, yes, and inspired and beauty, among my better. For those of you who talk to me regularly, you will recognize your own ideas that you gave me. The idea is about how to energize yourself to do all the things you must do in life – but especially how to find inspiration for the great things each of us are called to achieve.
Daniel Christopher June
Energizing yourself
Ama my diaphanous muse,
be warm as wax and melt for me!
Life is prickers and poison ivy; when we follow our own path, we must walk through briars and wrath. Our whim, our wont, is the commanding voice of our outer will, who sometimes kisses us like the sun, and sometime flits away like a will-o-the-wisps. Life is suffering. Yes, but life is also beatitude. When we are ready, we will declare with irreconcilable certainty: I choose to be happy. The emotions must cycle and cycle to allow an idea to emerge; the sorrow must turn like the blood of Uranus in the oceans, again as foam over the sea, till the shell of Love reveals Aphrodite. And so I choose to be happy, to embrace fate and befriend circumstance, and cease to pout and beg the world to accommodate me. In all my grief, I can say with pride: I can still write.
What I can do is al l that concerns me; what I can control is my universe of strength. My will is shepherd of my thoughts. Every stray lamb is gentled back again. The outer I, or the freedom of will, the conduit of fate, is a habit of thinking that gives voice to our importance, our calling, our purpose. This will to is like an arrow on the brow, guiding the eyes of our mind to that one place we should be. It is pure habit, and put into place be the principles of habit: constant practice and every mode of reinforcement. Perhaps a solid life trauma or religious experience is necessary to lay this habit deep into our mind.
Religions give us divine eyes to see our experience, philosophy gives us the eyes of reason: they are all artificial habits that may have no external correlate, nor need they meet one. The most popular religions include the streamlined moral systems of Christianity and Buddhism.
Christianity and Buddhism are similar in that they both simplify and epitomize the complexity of their parent religion. Hinduism and Judaism are far richer, subtler, and more complex than their popular offspring, and therefore, they market worse. One central idea to Christianity and Buddhism is the moral imperative to commit suicide: and both recommend this as the highest good of life. Buddhism says there is no self, Christianity says the self is sinful and must be sacrificed to God. Is the self so wretched, after all? Are not all stories, stories about selves? And stories are interesting for that same reason. Stories are about people, their minds, their emotions, their “egos,” their desires – and that’s why we can’t get enough of them. We care about those sorts of things. The recommendation that we not care about those things, things that are built into our psychology to care about, could only come from an ascetic urge for spiritual distinction. Ditto the idea that we should “annul the ego.” There could be no natural desire to annul the ego and what it stands for, unless one wished to promote and advertise some spiritual triumph. Such a triumph, or any desire for one, would be impossible without the motivation of the very same ego in question, thus leaving the project paradoxical if not downright hypocritical. With Christianity, the fantasy of suicide comes from a sense of personal unworthiness – and such an emotional prejudice comes from the widespread malady of depression, and especially a depression that resents those who are happy and not at all depressed, who are later called “the proud.” With Buddhism, the fantasy of suicide comes from a sense of the unworthiness of life in general – and such an emotional prejudice comes from the widespread malady of anxiety, and especially an anxiety that resents those who are cheerful and not at all anxious, who are later called “the ignorant.”
The body is the lens of the mind. The ego is the interface between body and mind, and no system ought to annul it, indeed cannot, short of literal suicide, and so metaphysical ideals are not literal, should not be actually sought, but only sought the way the moth chases the moon, as a distant guidepost that, if ever approached directly, would kill the moth.
The body’s energy, its motivation, is inspired by and exists for human needs: memories are the hollow walls which each fill with a unique flavor of motivation, a differentiated energy, that can be swallowed only by the appropriate tongue, to expend into the proper deed. Ideas act both as centers of emotional energy, and that emotional energy, or desire, surrounds that idea and pushes it into our out of immediate focus, such as when you desire to drink, and the image of a cup of water is pushed into your immediate focus and out again. In this case, desires are charges around objects, and move them into and out of focus. The ideas themselves are made of more tightly wrapped energy that can in turn be released with that idea is analyzed. Certain ideas work as conduits of energy transferring it from one object to another. This network of energy makes information interesting, by making energy move from the needed object to the analogous object.
Ideas as conduits structure energy. Certain concepts and especially metaphysical concepts exist primarily to manage moods, and need not refer to any outer reality. God, Heaven, Nirvana, Karma, have meaning only as to how they make us feel. Lacking that, they have no purpose, use, or scientific value. Knowing human needs, we could have predicted that we would invent them, though we prefer to say we “discovered them” or that they were “revealed” to us. Looking at a primitive man, we would be able to see what ideal objects he would make over the millennia. What is the “supernatural,” pragmatically? Supernatural objects posit truth claims beyond criticism. Every system makes assumptions out of bounds of doubt. Those who tell stories of a higher intelligence wish the authority of a higher intelligence, one that has the right to recommend and even demand our interest and obedience. The entire value of the supernatural is to orient the natural, to lay a framework which doubt and science are forbidden to touch. This is called “sacred.”
Dreams, daydreams, and even the imagination which accompanies a set narrative, are so influenced by desire as to flow and shift without set anchors. A few anchors, preferably sensual and immediate, must keep the dream in place. The best symbols are physical: they can be hoisted against doubt. And so our stories of Greece and Egypt must hold onto a few pieces of stone and pottery, which act as the living body of ancient Greece, and the full history is merely the spirit surrounded those broken bones and shards.
All supernatural realities, included the stories and myths we hear of the gods or the afterlife or fables with morals, stand for metaphysical concepts, and they form the pipes and lines of an integrated economy: they exist to channel motivation. The adherents to any religion may collectively share contrary and dissimilar goals, and yet their methods for processing their motivation will be similar, since they have each internalized a similar ordering principle, or an engine for putting energy in order, and into and out of conscious awareness.
How is the philosopher different? For the philosopher, the true ideas are the perennial questions. These questions are the active ingredients of all philosophy, and are the greatest gifts she has bestowed upon us. The various methods for answering them are her second boon; the structures of her systems the third, and the defined terms that result, a distant fourth. “God” and “Heaven” would, for the philosopher, be in the fourth category. For him, the ability to formulate a method is the greatest glory. He will cheerfully warn that “the simple answers are almost always wrong. It requires centuries to reduce a complex correct answer to simplicity,” and he is correct. Our collective minds must cycle over the same ideas for generations until a few hearty proverbs can epitomize them, a few pithy stories, to inspire the rest. Beauty must be reduced to truth, and truth must reincarnate as beauty again.
Art as an “end in itself” is a terrifying idea, and leads to terrifying results, experiments in exploring the limits of the medium of the genre – abortions and demons as cautionary tales against excessive innovation. The child is stupefied, and the angels cringe. And yet the gross excess of each generation is quickly lost into the blissful ignorance of history, and we focus instead on epitomes of beauty.
Yes, religions and philosophies make circuits and channels for our passions, but beauty is the seducer and beauty the inspirer: truth must use beauty to win his goal. Lacking this, suicide is preferable.
How do we find motivation? How do we get the energy we need to create a beautiful life, and live it beautifully? Discipline digs the wells; inspiration fills them. We must do the things we hate to do until we love to do them. Or lacking that, we will have still hollowed out a cavern for some sort of energy to fill.
Motivation is a problem. What I want I must not really want, since I do not work to gain it. And what I do achieve in this world, even if I lament it, is in fact the true to my heart, because that is what I was willing and able to achieve. All problems are intellectual problems, and the first step in solving them is to set each stray emotion in its correct circuit. In this way, the tapestry becomes whole, and we can see the problem for what it is. Thinking requires constant input of unique materials. The mind too must eat and sleep. We must try new things and slowly learn to love what is lovely.
I am slow to love and slower to cease to love. I could only give me full heart to a few good things. Some people wish to master God. They call this “obeying God” not realizing that god is an idea fully owned within their own mind; and imagine their relationship is with an external being. But lacking that, the outcome is the same; the idea has been made to mean everything, a panacea and all-goal for them, so that all questions are answered by the same term. And since ideas are objects, and since handling objects is a skill, they can, after years, master God and become artists of God – with results varying as much as they do among religious folk.
For others the idea to master is “love” – and here the idea of love is different from the feeling of love, since the feeling is a mere experience, whereas the idea of love can be a complex framework that orders the other passions and the mind to do a wide assortment of functions. God, love, and whatever else, are mere idols, symbolic images to dissolve various experiences into a single menstruum. For what is better to own, a hundred tools that can perform one function, or one tool that can perform a hundred functions? For a guitarist, the instrument serves as a vehicle for expressing his emotions, for making his emotions objects for others to share, for making a living perhaps, for entertaining others. The instrument is a basic entity, not very much at all. It is a mere medium, but for the man who loves that medium, it comes to stand for all things, as an interface between self and world. Each person’s calling is epitomized in a similar bit of matter, or, in the case for the more abstract, in an instrumental concept.
Motivation, therefore, will be structured to bring energy into a few basic ideas. All the conduits, pipelines, and pressure valves will be to empower our instruments of choice. This frugality of means is the best chance of mastery, and with mastery comes grace and pride. When one can mingle love and power into passion, then he will atone the heart and mind, and set them working to the same goals.
The circuits of emotions require simple balances. Anxieties seize up energy and depress the system, and this in order to avoid a wrongful discharge of emotion. Such emergency tactics can be avoided if we know how to use metaphors as conduits to express intense emotions with a better outlet. Some sort of pressure gauge will allow a steady stream of motivation, rather than an abrupt and overwhelming discharge.
The difficulty with procrastination, for instance, comes from the habit of lacking the motivation to accomplish a duty until an impending due date inspires enough panic to motivate a full-scale discharge of action. What if we accomplished our duty the first day it was assigned, got it done with the same burst of energy, and then spend the subsequent week until deadline relaxing? This is more difficult, because they burst of work at the end of the deadline has been fed a long stream of anxiety all along, which like an embolism was waiting to burst.
All energy in our system is from the reserves. Even appetites for foods that are not needed for nutrition can build up. I recall getting sick of soda pop, and swearing off it for a year. Eventually, my sweet tooth led me to fruit juices, and I began mixing fruit juices for fun. Another year later, and I drank a soda and it hit me like a kiss to the lips, and I was in love with it – and drank them with more enjoyment then before. The experience can only be aesthetic, since any other need is lacking – sugar water is sugar water, juice or pop. And this sort of experience cycled through iced teas and finally coffee, for years now. I call these appetites that slowly build and then burst to be stays of energy, and I have a similar experience with certain foods, both specifically such as in hamburgers, which I am now sick of, and genres of food, such as Italian, which I now like; and certain authors are to my taste, and sometimes a new book just hits the spot and I am in heaven reading it, but other times a try a half dozen different new books and none of them please; and also with friends: when a certain person interests me and excites me, the energy is palpable, and that person wants to be around me as much as possible, because I am sort of in love with him or her, and she feels great, she feeds off that energy. But when suddenly my interest is back on writing poems or essays, the time spent with my friend becomes less important to her, but really to me, so that she makes excuses to do other things, when in fact I no longer dance with electricity when I see her. It is impossible to fake love where she is lacking, nor hide love where she is full. Every man or woman is seen for what they are, sooner or later; we can deceive others on some matters, but not all; there is too much truth in every breath we speak.
The heart is a garden where every flower has her season, and every fruit its time. We can cultivate the garden and yet the moods and motivations can only come when they are ready.
Differentiated energy becomes the passion of the moment. I have a hundred appetites and glut each when it is ripe; like a tree with myriad fruits, which I devour when the green is gone.
Therefore, metaphors are the saviors of mankind. A metaphor is a conduit for a certain type of energy, a certain passion. It becomes clearer every day that the things we want the most in the universe do not exist: when we suffer, where is divine comfort? when we are wronged, where is divine justice? When we are lonely, where is our perfect mate? When we are successful, who will share in our success? Ideals are lies, and they exist only to tantalized. Grab the fruit but it eludes you. We require instead metaphorical substitutions. If God will not kiss my brow, I can imagine he will in the next life. This alone fulfills me, even if there is no afterlife. The metaphorical displacement of what I want into a hope or story itself fulfills.
In this way, we need all sorts of metaphysical stories, stories about the universe as a whole, history as a whole, mankind as a whole, to set us into place. We need them, and yet they are not scientific, nor historical. We need lies with which to live.
Not that we deceive ourselves. What we need must in some sense exist. Trusting our needs is the greatest of wisdom, the one nearest to the heart, truest to the individual. Nevertheless, the philosophical and religious needs can only be fulfilled through appealing fictions, and these must stand as most important to us, without any historical or scientific justification. This is the way the nonexistent supernatural motivates, inspires, and pleases the very existent natural: the supernatural is merely a point of view about the natural.
And so we require certain metaphysical concepts to motivate us. The ideas of the outermost and the innermost are the limits of reality in my system. The Outermost is the All, the Innermost is the Self.
The outer I, or the freedom of the will, acts as a conduit of fate, though a mere habit of thinking. It gives us our importance, our calling, our purpose.
Human beings can also act as conduits of our emotions, to love the parts of us we cannot love. Your embrace runs circuits up my spine. We come to feel through the hearts of others, feel proud because father is proud of us, feel guilty because our son is failing. Because I need you so much, I hate you. I need you yet I find no satisfaction in what you give me. You pull away and leave. The more I need a friend, the better I am to stay alone. And so, men seek women whom they can control, and who control them in ways they cannot control themselves. It is as if our hands were always stitching the hearts of others, working over their systems, typing programs into their mind. Solitude is difficult, intimacy impossible, and so we exist in the middle, sometimes more alone, sometimes more intimate, but never does my soul converge with yours. That is a possibility for the afterlife.
Your heart beats for mine, and mine for yours. Everybody runs at a metabolic rate, which can be corrected by exercise. The mind must dig wells which will only slowly fill and erupt. We live at a tempo and our juices and reserves fructify at a tempo. Resonance and tempo bring familiars into intimacy. Every city, every family, every business, moves at a tempo by which each member is measured and evaluated. The tempo of a man or woman in a society is their rate of thinking, influenced by their rate of speaking, hearing, and working.
Each city works has a tempo, or series of tempos, such as the rate of traffic, business hours, legal proceedings, and the general pace of customer service, entertainment, etc. Each of us internalize the whole and evaluate ourselves in terms of this. Language moves thought like paddles through water, and so as we talk and listen, our mind stirs. Tempo of speech, tempo of movement requires an internal clock a habitual rate to set the mind’s processing. “The scholar, when he comes, will be known by an energy that will animate all who see him.”
In this, and many other ways, society is like a network of pipes. We filter and pass ideas and emotions and even materials through each other. Money is moral. Money moves at a rate, and silently causes empires to grow and collapse. Ideas hold currency as well, and can be inflated or counterfeited just as money was. In money, ideas are symbolized.
Ideas are put over materials. Symbols each evoke a series of realities, and have the power of evoking all these together. Every system, every set of stories, can be handled with a few bare symbols. Talk of the cross is enough to swing Christianity around by a chain. Talk of the Wheel does the trick for Hinduism. The symbol evokes a series of realities and reduces their complexity to a gesture. Symbols keep the idea reproducing in the minds of others, and limit what language can come out of that symbol.
A group of persons or institutes are also representative, and stand for a series of ideas, symbolize those ideas, emanate them as a magnet with charge. The physical symbols is the body for the ideas it stands for.
And so metaphysical ideas, being the widest, and most general, structure so much more of the living reality. Since metaphysical ideas represent more, they are more important, do more, are the great fruits of a million minds. Each man’s map of the universe orients him, points our eyes upon the right realities. Art functions only to arrest the senses and to seduce the mind to accept a value. Beyond this, it is mere entertainment and distraction.
We only see the beauty that is sympathetic to our inner beauty. Sympathy does not need kindness or well-wishing – indeed the cruelest of hates could be from a sympathetic man – but sympathy means identifying with the experience of another. When a man or woman sees a certain child, or a certain poem, and tears come to his eye, his creative inner has been touched, like to like, and he feels the realities within that he has forgotten. Sympathy draws us together. That I am such and such on the inner, and resonate to all that is similar, means I am never alone in the universe, but that I have a well of energy deep within myself that will feed upon the contact and celebration of all things and all people of a like nature. Happiness motivates. And happiness requires the honest and magic statement: I deserve to be happy and in fact I am happy. Then our outermost will, the great God who is our own mind, will resonate and find his heaven in the system of our concepts. God is the edge of the private will, and we call her Universe.
There are many celebrated ways to “recharge your soul,” and they range from praying, to meditating, to talking with friends, to reading one’s favorite author. Essentially, these activities reduce to recharging oneself by resonating to what he is sympathetic to. All fine art does this for a man: the art must not only be beautiful, but it must present his beauty, his own self image (“my face before I was conceived”). Just as a guitar string will spontaneously vibrate when the key of E is played, or when a poorly constructed bridge seizes and sways to the right frequency of breeze, so do each of us resonate to a few symbols, a few objects, ultimately, to a few hidden names. When a country can resonate as one, it will conquer, when a church can resonate as one, it means revival, when a scientist rife with a great idea sings it, the world is electrified.
To put the same idea in the mythic register, before this lifetime we were born in the womb of the mother as sparks, breaking apart from single cluster. I am from this cluster, my neighbor from that. When I can hear the resonance of my innermost, I can also hear it in others. There are those throughout history and throughout the world now who are mine and after my own. Those are my readers and my favorites: for them I exist and write. Though my words dampen and depress this one and that one, my own accept it as their own, since it feeds their soul, and for them there is no envy, for who envies what is properly his own? I never envied Emerson, or Whitman, or Nietzsche, not even in the way I would envy my brother or friend; for I felt a right to all their ideas, and would not blush to have plagiarized them. For in the world of spiritual power, there is no copyright. One mind works through us, and we are diamond bursts from the same ore.
Nevertheless, I find in most my friends, only a strand of me, and in me only a strand of them. I take from Paul what Paul can give me, and give him the same in turn, and we do not grow divine through our barter, but we are still warmed, as I am warmed by the love of my cat. Yet I long always to find my own, and draw near as I dare, lest the overfull lust of resonance forces us to close the eyelid of our heart, and blind us from too much light. We did not come into the world atop each other, but diffused and scattered.
Let us decorate our lives with only those symbols that resonate. When you deck your apartment, consider it a sort of wind tunnel, in which the alignment of all things comes to resonate and charge you. The mere set of your shoes, let alone the set of your voice, sets my world in order, till all I own and influence lights up with me, and if my full influence could be mapped, it would like a satellite view of a city at night, where the collective streetlights outline the cities.
I’m slow to love, and slower to cease …
The wraith of our romance will linger
I wish for you close, and cornered you flee
Your echoing words are my singers.
I face the world and say:
In this life I do the reaching
And you do the pulling away
What can I hold to?
The circumstance of our birth, lineage, location, nature of conception, heritage of parents, all resonate deep in my soul, and even distant adoption cannot shake it out. Like a halo around the innermost, our conception sings out, like a rip in space, the same rip we must slip through upon death. The best stories are like daily life: the first chapters set it up, the last few unwind it. And we are choosing and freely creating ourselves from the first. Necessity finds final form in freedom.
Let us therefore drink from our roots. Insist on your family, your city, your nation. Take in the national literature as your mother’s milk. Know your fated place in history and the entire wisdom of mankind is your nourishment.
Great books and great ideas take centuries to digest. To give accurate summaries, nicknames, and glosses takes painstaking insight into essentials, and many generations of redaction and refinement so that, finally, we all have a sense of what the great books and great art is about, and those who study it carefully especially know what a rich literature of commentary as grown over the surface of a book like a garden.
Blood is the red thread. We each have a style for building friendships. I have a stereotyped way of solving problems, as do you. When I can reduce the terms of each situation into the language I am used to, then I can twist the problem into the shape I can best deal with. This is why some friendships take longer than others to initiate. Some strange treasures take months of careful patience to seduce into friendship. I can hardly stand you now, by and by I will mourn your absence.
Blood is soul, and all that is soul is analogous to blood; just as spirit is breath, and all that is spirit is analogous to breath. Meditating is counting your breath. A better meditating is counting the breath of great books, the period the author uses, the punctuations marks. This alone let’s you know the breath and heft of his mind’s lungs. Read his soul too, the nouns and verbs of his speech, which is blood of blood.
I read reflexively, life is a sort of reading and writing to me, and literally, I feel naked without my blank book and pencil in my pocket, and a book for reading in my hand. I carry them as the wanderer carries his walking stick and wallet. I read widely, every feasting my mind. And there are a few books that are blood brothers to me, and I have dipped my blood into them, and theirs into mine:
Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, and Gay Science
Emerson’s Essays, and Conduct of Life
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
Thoreau’s Walden
Melville’s Moby Dick
I call them blood of my blood, for their nouns and verbs are nutrients of my soul, just as Whitman and Emerson are the gods that live in my lungs.
Solitude does not mean isolation: one can be alone in the city, and crowded alone in his room. It is good to fast from your work – in my case to put down good books. Every rule must make an exception, every taboo must make an indulgence.
In daily life, my cell phone is a sort of tether for balance – I send out dozens of text messages which are empty, yet breathing is also empty, yet necessary. Genius must balance itself with a lot of stupidity, and brilliance must dance with his shadow.
Ayn Rand and Slovej Zizek and William Gass I have read all they wrote: and yet I despise each of them as ugly people. They knew certain magical tricks I would wrest from them, yet their souls did not resonate to mine, and I sat at their feet only to step on their necks. It is for my own that I sing, those who were soul of my soul at our conception, dear to the universe in her grace, in that time’s place that coincides with each of our earthly conceptions. I take from the world and give to you.
Soul resonates to soul, and when all the parts find a common denominator and resonates that louder, and become a unit, the central atom of that being emerges from wherever he always was, and is born from eternity into time. Whether this account is metaphysical nonsense or true science is no matter to us, for it is a poetry to set us in our place – and for this reason metaphysics is necessary and therefore true.
We are one blood, wherever and whenever we are born on this planet, and to whomever we are born. And each individual soul finds its analogies in nature, and finds a common substance with some peculiar form. William Bentley resonated to the snowflake, and studied them with a passionate fit to melt them all. Darwin was a catalog of beetle’s physiognomies. Caesar was a nation who led a nation. Every man is layered and thick: perhaps his essence is a name hidden in some distant star, and here he walks on earth, and his analogy walks again on every inhabited planet, and perhaps under different guises and species.
Even still, the traumas and intimacies of our youth set an energy deep in the soul, in a central layer, and all intimacy changes the hum of our self. In a classroom, one seat will call to me, and in any arrangement of events, in any society, I will roll to my place like a marble down a hill, till the gravitational center fit for me and no other I will find.
I handle all problems as if they were the same problem. My private language and yours does not need to figure out solutions every day, so much as reduce each situation to a primitive language, a simple set of terms, of our own idiolect, perhaps unspeakable and mute, and after we have done that, we can solve the problem readily – just as any problem in a formal logic class is easy once you can reduce the terms to standard notation.
And this is why we study theory, and why theory energizes and empowers us. Theory is the wide heaven whose whole eternity presses down into the one finger of practice and allows its success. And so we can do all the petty duties of life, because our full soul is wide as the universe, and puts the full pressure on the subtle moment. The weight of the universe finds final twitch in my typing tips.
And so we conspire with our intimates. We breath the same breath, and soon start to talk alike. How soon husband has his wife in his heart and lungs, feels her judgment and praise in all he does, even if the external she is ignorant, can’t even leave the trash a mess without her nag at the back of his ear. And finally her voice becomes his own voice, and the spiritual singularity begins. In the next life, their blood will be knit to blood, an achievement reserved for their children in this life.
All great thinkers are in conspiracy with others. The Allist overlords of the world are none other than the great minds who have always had designs for the human race, and aimed to set the tower of literature up to the eternal heavens. The men and women from my spark know me already, knew me in centuries ago, and will know me forever more. Let this book die, it will make no difference. I have already whispered it to the universe, and she gossips in each their ears.
Read. And as you read, think. Step back and watch yourself read and think: you are knitting a dual thread. Let the words hypnotize you. Every book breaths. You are hypnotized by tones of voice, cadence and rhythm. Let a book do this, and yet keep your critical eye in the background, invisible and never impressed and never unimpressed. Pick up ten books one after the other, reading only a paragraph, and you escape all spells. Read any book for ten pages, and the magic is upon you. Read the first book you hold, the same paragraph ten times, and you are breathing deeply the air. The scholar will energize you. But remember that you are the magician’s apprentice: what you learn in this life you can take to eternity. Keep your eyes open. By hypnotized and watch how it is done.
Breath is musical. Tension increases satisfaction. Eat ten dry cookies, and the milk when you finally allow it to your lips is orgasmic. Sex is so much fuller with an hour of foreplay, or better still, months of romantic trifles and teases. The dissonance of music is superb, especially to increase the relief and triumph of a full flung cadence. The guitarist Steve Vai loves complex and disorienting virtuosity, but only impresses me when he can draw a simplistic anthem of a riff for conclusion. And so the high-minded confusion of sophisticated complexity must reduce to the mantra, simple, basic, and bright.
Anxieties freeze energy from exploding, save the system from crisis, and depress the system. Yet they pool frustration into muscles, tics, distortions of body and mind, waiting till finally the angel of grace can snip the wire and let the full load of aching pent pain explode into pure love joy. The same method, which is shaped like a joke with a punch line, is the wisdom and foolishness of gnawing the teeth ragged on a koan for forty years, until one opens ones eyes, which weren’t’ even closed in the first place, and is enlightened. Nirvana is a punch line long panted for: cease all desire, and desire to cease all desire.
Language is magic. It is the handle to hold every experience. Language is a blanket over us, a matrix of syntax, as if computer code flowed in lime green letters around us, each man his own code, his own idiolect, pulsing logic and grammar from the polestars behind his eyes. Every sentence is a bent glass tube, and the mind a thick purple smoke that passes through them. Thus the language of books shapes the mind, pulls it out like glass, grows opaque with our emotions. It is rightly said that we can only give from what we have, and work from what we are. Yet the world plants little seeds in our brain, until self and world are intermingled, and I am world soul, and the great single mind of Adam that is the whole of mankind, gods and demigods included, is in my mind as well, and I look on my neighbor as a fellow cell in the great Leviathan of the human body. “Perusha” we are called, and the infinitely thick layers of each of our cells are scatted throughout the cosmos. I have always been, yet common sense says I am only thirty, and the moment of my conception is in the memories of my parents. I am most energized when I am in touch with all that is of me, heart of my heart, breath of my breath. Soul and spirit must meet and mingle, like Allfather Odin when he fell in love with Loki, and shared blood with the beautiful giant, as brother; so is our own doom and world’s end based in the blood we’ve mingled with our own – never love a woman unfit to mother your children! Never commit a deed unfit to flower your biography! Find your place within the Motherverse, and you will be energized to do all you can.
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Perfection
Is
Easy
www.msu.edu/~junedan
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