My latest allay, that is, poetical essay in the allform, is entitled "Ground and Territory." It has grown to be about 50 pages, and I know the material is difficult and I don't expect my friends to read everything I wrote. Believe it or not, I write about twenty times as I send out to the group. So here is a fragment of that essay, looking at the idea of having a sacred space. This idea I wrote more formally and in careful instruction elsewhere, but here I charge the themes in anticipation of that.
Take Care, Caretakers!
Daniel Christopher June
**
I am an idolater, as is every true artist. Whitman identified himself as especially this, with his scripture, inspired by the Holy Spirit, his Leaves of Grass, as proving above and within it, the pure "eidolon." I worship Ama through the women I idolize, through the men I idolize, through the images I make. My idols are those things through which I worship the divine. Only fools talk of worshipping idols, just as a fundamentalist bushman would call the use of a cell phone a crime since you are only talking with metal and plastic, and not a real person.
The most obsessive religious people, the Muslims, make an idol out of smashing idols. They believe that God is so fixed to one name and one form and one book, that all other divinely inspired texts are Satanic But the Koran is an idol in itself, as is Jesus and the Bible, and the God they speak of is an incredible idol compared to the Tao, which says "The name that can be named is not the Eternal Name." That in itself destroys all sectarianism.
Of my eight virtues, pragmatism, or daily practical living, is a spiral: I cycle over the same things. In the same way, I return to the same perfect books, reading them again and again, and return to my own perfect book, the Idius, and am ever editing it. Life is editing. Daily we edit our story, the Narrative of our being.
The inner virtues of Independence and Creativity, whose edges are evened by daily practicality, so that in all things we are reasonable, balanced, and healthy, uses that balancing, that cycling, to turn and return over the five limbs of virtue: order, honesty, optimism, commitment, and writing. The last, writing, the writing life, wriving, study, the internalization of all forms, firmly rejects the bad idolatry of the Abrahamic religions of their poisonous words "Only one name can save you, only one form is good, only one way goes to heaven." They invent hell, and like the proverb, the pit they dug for their enemy has instead swallowed them.
Wriving is my left hand, is the book in my hand at all times, the study of life, the reading of life as a text. In this, all the world is my territory insofar as I use the right critical lens. I say no to nothing, except I see it in reference to me and my goals. I do not submit to its goals. I am interested in Allism as I understand it, but I am no sectarian and I am no ant sectarian: the level of sects is far below the level of the all. Sects and denominations are necessary, a necessary good and a necessary evil. Allism will have as many sects as it has adherents: since the lifeway refers ultimately to one man's relation through every layer of the all, I will hear nothing of the right or the wrong way to be an Allist. Your heart knows what it needs.
The idol of focus, the fetish of evocation, and the totem and reverence are constant features of Allism, just as they really are of all religions, even those who pretend otherwise. We all love territories and mascots, and such Cosmopolitans as the ancient Greeks were still Cosmopolitans instead of Athenians, which also rendered them providential. Where you limit yourself you lose part of yourself.
The WV, wriving of life, V the nub, the tongue, the finger of Ama, the W the finger and thumb, the lips, the love for Ama, this is our basic being in life. To be is to self-reflect. A being has self-being, first of all, and then secondly, relationships to all other things. The self being of each person, the me-myself, as the fountainhead of creative emanation, where all new energy comes into the world, new forms of energy that couldn't come elsewhere. And yet we require new experiences, new idols, new eidolons, new faces and loves, to bring forth every facet of our infinite diamon.
The story of this is told in Charles Ives' Fourth Sympony. The first part positst the question, ever present in Ives work, the question of human existence. The second movement takes the Christian tropes of "the world" as a bad thing -- if that could be believed! -- and uses Hawthornes evil "comedy" about a man going to hell as its backkground for how the invention fo the railroad train, and all human invention, is a loud and painful fanfare. Indeed, this worldy part of the journey, man's first step, involves three layers: the domestic, played on melancholy strings and bells, the jovial society, played on piano, and the loud and demanding bararic yawp of the train, of nationalism, of schoolpride, of the fanfare, of the comedy. This "comedy" isn't funny -- its painful as hell. It is Ives establishing his heterosexual masculinity. I can only enjoy it when I am quite anxious, at which point I put it on full blast and am purified. Naturally, the third section lead to the answer of organized religion. The piece receives its religious epiphany at two and a half minutes in, when the chord resolves up to F. My neck stretches back in epiphany and joy each time I hear it. After that, the pious churchgoer follows the logic of his revelation in propriety and decency. After that route has worn itself out, the man is ready for the end of his spiritual journey: the fourth movement is pure apotheosis. It opens with the tinkerers bells and the chisellers hammers as they create the universe -- apotheosis is through creativity -- and the mood and tone is exactly the same as Ives' Universe Sympathy. Eventually, this crescendoes into the great dissolving of the anxiously solidified heart of the world and the regularlized flow of the church, so that the limbs melt away, as in old age, and then the diamond of the heart is revealed, as gods are made with hair of grey, and the beat of apotheosis evokes the arising of a purer, more etherial, material and perfect body, at which point, the questioners from the first movement return as gods, singing gratitude for the universe.
The symphony as a whole is a compex story that requires many re-listenings. Eventually, it abbreviates itself int a form, an idea. I can bend my head back and experience the whole sympathy. Whenthe meaning is solidified, cycled again and again, perfectly edited, digested, gestated, and ready for birth, I myself create the idol, the mystic image that contains the whole experience and presents it in utter simplicity. What a great spiritual gift! How sublime! How perfect! Only the ignornat and envious would give such a Divine a bad name, and in its unjustified spiriutal arrogance declare its own religion superior.
The sinners hate beauty, spit on it, smash their faces, smash the heads of infants against the ground. But the Greeks are beautiful forever, and we are beautiful because of them. Therefore, my sacred place, my creative womb, the chamger of my alter. Lapamalay, my desk and workstation, the most perfect form of matter I have yet to have discover, and that because of what i do there, is surrounded and adorned by utter beauty, ever beauty, like a Catholic church, I reveal the divine by surrounding myself in divine beauty. Beauty is her own excuse. Let no prophet jeer: we are beautiful, proud, and modest before the envious.
"Nature is cursed" is itself the real curse, dispensed on whomever believes it. The Native Americans believe not a word of it, nor does Emerson, who says that to Know God and to Know Thyself is to study nature, nor Thoreau who leaves man and religion to drink deep the cup of life alone in nature, nor Whitman, who adores the American landscape and like his body counts no part worthy of exclusion. Nature-hate is AntiAmerican. Nature is under no curse. Man is under a curse only insofar as he believes nature is cursed, just as the story of the forbidden fruit is itself the very fruit it describes, and to eat it is to grow ashamed of your beauty, and to clothe yourself in the quotes of dead scriptures.
After all, who is it, of all peoples, who pollute and taint the Earth other than those who already believe it to be polluted and tainted. Clearly, their hate of the earth leads them to abuse her.
What is the true fall? Man's true fall is his fall into innocence. At first, he is expected to fill roles, to be "innocent" as a "creator" would want him to be, artificially ignorant, all but impotnent, in an overly planned, pointless garden of pleasure. It is akin to the adolescent who praises his girlfriend as if she were some flawless perfect. In this case, her fall is a fall into innocence; when she falls in his eyes, it is beyond the juvenile and stupid idealizing into reality, like the falling of the steps necessary in progress. It is not a fall down, it is a fall forward, out of the imaginary and pointless into the real and necessary. Reality is as it should be. The world is good. Life is beautiful. I am perfect. You also will be perfect when you are able to realize you alawys were, but until then you are still in a state of artificial innocence, better known as "ignorance," charming in your nudity but without the wisdom to guide your beauty from envious eyes. Modesty is a virtue of maturity. The Gods are modest. Not one of them requests praise -- only demons do that -- but all of them are praised by the sheer regard of any whose eyes look upon them. Ama is she who must be loved. Any person claiming to not love her simply doens't know her, and that is not a fault worth condemning anybody over. Beauty is her own excuse; the true divine can never be denied, resisted, hated, reviled, blasphemed, or disregarded. That is how it is divine. She is truly the Allgod and Allgoddess in and of herself because all who see her adore her, in innocence, purity, kindness, and reverence. She makes no threats. Only impotence makes threats. The father who can't control his children talks endlessly of grounding them and beating them. The mother who loves praises her children and is proud of their accomplishments. That is love. That is divine.
Such realties are self-evidnet to the one who understand them, but confusing to the man in ignorance. And we must all be in ignorance sometimes, and are always ignorant of some matter or other. Therefore, never despise those who believe, think, or feel different. Smile and look away. The Goddess is not a topic for debate. There is nothing to prove, no "apolegetics," no "beleive or go to hell," none of that childish behavoir. We are not childish, but childlike. We love her not because she orders us to, but because we see her beauty and know her heart. The command to love is a blasphemy if ever there was one. Such a command can only shut the heart of love, and open the heart of hpocrisy, which is also the evangelical heart. Convince enough people to believe, and maybe you can kill your own doubts. But your doubts are the most sacred part about you, your only real hope in the cosmic scheme of things. What you were told to call demons your whole life, the thoughts you were trained to regard as demons whispering to you, are in fact the whispers of your innocence conscience, which can never fully believe what is by natore noxious and obnoxious. Your words confess that thing, but your heart knows the truth. Having found her, there is no doubt, nor is doub a sin. Love is simple. You find you can love any man, woman, or child, insofar as you are willing and able to open your eyes to the real beauty all mena nd women shine.
Just as even the most carefully cleaned mirror reveals small flaws if scene from the telling angle -- I call it the mother-in-law perspective -- so too, even the rapist and murderer is still beautiful, below all those nasty habits and expressions, a beautiful life. Not that we should spare him -- for that beauty survives no matter how we punish him.
Man and Wife are by nature the perfect All. A man is most perfect when in love with his wife, and with his full wife, his friends and lovers and favorite figures of the past -- indeed with all mankind. For his immediate partner stands for all that, she is the symbol for all that, the lens upon the world, as he is for her.
Mattria, the all, whom we call Allmother, is unified with her male principle, he and she are one being in one flesh. This too is the ultimate goal of all who first become gods, than aeons, than galaxies, than complete universes. In this life, we have a choice: to become angels or gods. Most people become angels to this God or that God (though they mistakenly think it is always the same God); and those who allege to no God, insofar as they serve and do not create the divine out of their own beings, are nevertheless, merely servants, in this life and the next. But the man and woman who is willing to be something of themselves, to love themselves, to recognize the self-increasing logos that is the secret name of their inner necessity, they will not be mortalized. The mortals cut mind from necessity, and go to a heaven where there are no tears of necessity. They lose their soul to get into heaven. And indeed they are happy enough for it. But they will never be Gods. And lacking that first step, they never will transcend being Gods either, but are doomed to their heaven for eternity. Better to struggle in passion, suffering, bliss, pleasure, pain, and glory, forever, than to sell you self for some nirvana or heaven or peace. The Gods therefore smile and do not comment to the heaven bound, never try to dissuade them. They merely live their lives, create beauty in all things, and are happy.
For just as humility is the cornerstone virtue of Christianity, and Silence is the cornerstone virtue of the Native American religions, so too is Creativity the center, the centering womb, the creative womb of Allists, and the orgasm is our worship, and the bliss of all creating is also the bliss of our apotheosis.
We each are given a gift in this life, a gift from Ama. That gift, humble and mean and not impresive to our fellow men, we may see with our spiritual eyes as a true key to opening the powers of our soul. But if we don't develop our gift, if we sell it short to gain the gifts of others, the virtues and morals of our neighbors and friends, we lose it forever. The aim of life, what we train in our children from the moment they meet eyes with us is: be yourself, do your best, develop your gifts, be creative, love life, love your family, love your frineds. Toddler ethics, yes, but perfect ethics.
\ ~@M@~ /
perfectidius.com
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