This
is from the Final Chapter of the Life of Allism. In it I reflect on myself,
other allists, and our goals.
6. All and I
The Raccoon God
I am raccoon
god, child of night
My stomach
eats all my hands can find
These clever
fingers know tricks and signs
A touch of
moon and I have sight
I Play,
delight in subtle tricks
Chuckle at
you, seek your sweetest licks
Masked and
ringed from tail to bite.
These
scratches from wisdom's paw?
These winks
from my bandit's mask?
I am evil
innocent, childlike fast
Every thinker
falls down my maw
You love me as
I take from you
I limb up the
truth for a higher view
And chitter
with joy at the shades I ate raw
Make your scaffolding as wide as the galaxy: prepare your work with as much
space as you need to move about freely. Find a private place, the triangular
room of misbehavior, where nothing is forbidden, where your whim is absolute.
Share with me this moment in the void of the all. See each place according to
its mythological resonance.
“Dismiss every pretensive production, however fine its esthetic or
intellectual points, which violates, ignores, or doesn’t even celebrate the
central idea of All,” said Whitman. The mature mind seeks the relationships
between things, is no longer dazzled by exceptions and prodigies. The child
imitates, the adult invents. Seek not the innocence of the child, but the
innocence of the elder. There is no finer joy in life than finding your own way
to do things. The successful adult recalls the passion of childhood. There is a
layer of being, the passionate self, a dimension of ecstasy that never ceased,
but we must summon him from where he always is that creative self. Seek him in
your privacy. Before the world we must be presentable and polite. Politeness is
a sort of inverted aggression. Find your solitude and be rude and mocking. See
how holy and stupid the crowds are? People speak reverently of God because they
haven’t met him. God is neither more nor less to them than the very praise they
speak. God is just such a number of sycophantic hymns. He is the means to
praise and justify their own group. Couples are similar. Every couple has a
thing they do to be a couple, to celebrate their union—more than sex— a hobby,
a rejoined joy. These moments build a shared base, a private garden. Soon, they
know each other so well, they can speak a book in a word. A worn book is an
honor to the author. Alone with his mind you can get at his inner mood. The
persistent mood sways the group. In this, the solitary can move nations. I too
in solitude press my love to the universe. I drink you from your lips,
delicious in your kiss. For you who don’t know me, you may well say my
philosophy is an ugly oyster, but mind my heart of pearl! Tell me what you
read, and I’ll tell you who you are. Judge a man by the very words he hurls at
his enemies – so he is. By what you take in and what you put out, you change
the flux of information. Information is the fluid of society, it is charged
with emotion, and carries like blood all oxygen and nutrients. Mere information
changes content, changes form, and form is the most significant content.
Mere separateness augments a form. By merely putting something in the
place of the sacred, it is made sacred. So many things have been taken as sacred
throughout the ages: a bob of the head, prostration on the floor, the first day
of the week, the last –Islam sanctifies Friday, Judaism Saturday, Christianity
Sunday; how I wish to pledge allegiance to all three and enjoy an extended
weekend – so also are certain animals sacred, snakes, vultures, cats,
dung-beetles, each have been taken as totem, each revered; sex is sacred, the
crucifix is sacred, the host (bread and wine), and probably everything
conceivable has been declared sacred by somebody. The phallus was sacred to
Dionysus of the ancient Greeks (and to every self-respecting man since then),
the Yoni sacred to certain feminists. What is the common denominator in all
this reverence? Assuming that all these people benefitted from their religious awe, we take the attitude of
reverence itself as alone reverent, let the object be what it may. When a man
takes on the role of Priest, when he defines what he means by purity, when he stays within it without exception, he
has the power to make holy. What shall you or I make sacred? Before we decide
that, we must gain the ability to bless. We must become gods. What you loose on
earth will have been loosed in heaven, what you bind on earth will have been
bound in heaven. All men are created equal. By whom? The gods, who are more
than equal.
I therefore make sacred the ability to make sacred, and bless the
ability to bless. And as this might imply, the mirror is sacred to me, as the
intensifier. What matters to me is not what
you know, but how you know: I would teach
you nothing except how to teach yourself. I give you the gift of giving. I
create in you the ability to create. I want to make you more yourself, to clean
you of impurities, to give you an ornament which publishes your essence. My
gifts are cheap and easy, and yet they speak to the heart of the matter: I
don’t pay money, I pay attention, I see what is your own, I give you what you
already have, but didn’t know you had. I have no reason to impress you; I want
to help you impress yourself. My truest disciples will hardly speak of me –
they honor me by being themselves honorable. He who denies me before men, him
will I honor in heaven. I give you more than any man can when I am humble
enough to take from you. It is more blessed to take than to give. I make the
world happy by being myself happy, and enrich you by keeping my money. I point
to no god save your inner divine. I teach you nothing save what you already
know.
My spittle, the spread of my ink, the sink of my semen is medicinal. I
wrap my sentence like mistletoe, for my words are the cure all, bane of god and
gain of man. I am your panacea. I
teach you the secret ways of my words, which stroke your ears like fingers of
love. Come, practice like me, and be perfect
– is it so hard to be perfect? – and if you are not yet perfect, then be so
already by doing the perfect thing you can now
do to become so. Only perfection can become perfect. The intense focus of practice gives way to the nonchalant
performance of perfection, just as the intense focus of terrible Odin,
symbolized by his one great eye, gives way to the beautiful ease of Baldr,
Odin’s resurrected son. Let your resonator speak, your commanding voice of
certainty; it will cure you of distractions, break the bonds of religion, as in
what Mencken said of Nietzsche, that he was “a counterblast to sentimentality”
– what a mindseed in that! What a planter is the Resonator, how in the darkness
his seeds find root, as the Egyptian Deity who created the universe by
impregnating his own words and spitting from his mouth semen into the abyss –
is he not the type of us all? Create.
And to create, to raise your pyramid of creativity, your triangle of
dynamicism, you must master the square of focus and the circle of selection.
You must transcend, and achieve Concordance. This word is our jargon for the
terms we’ve heard, the combination of confluence
and congruence. Congruence, as Carl
Rogers said, is the uninterrupted flow of feelings into thoughts, of thoughts
into words, and of words into action. When a man's words and actions accord,
when one flows into the other without contradiction, then the man is said to be
integrated and have integrity. Confluence
is an idea long discussed in Taoism, in the terms of “doing no work,”
“going with the flow,” putting yourself in the center,” or as Emerson said, of
“being a pipe to the world soul, so that your greatest virtue is being smooth
and unobtruding.” Center yourself in your world, and let its influences flow
into you. Put yourself in just the right place within the world, be utterly
opportunistic. When you are in congruence with yourself, and when you are in
confluence with the world, then you are perfectly Concordant.
Put yourself in concordance with what you study and love. A good book is
the best of friends. Therefore, study your personal Bible, whatever book you
have found to be divine. Patience makes wealthy. When you can find a book
worthy, read one book a hundred times, read Whitman’s poems, as he said, “once
every season in the open air,” or read my own writings, as they require intense
repeated study, with thorough annotation, over an entire lifetime, only then
you will have swallowed down the author’s spirit and become intimate with him
in ways unknown between spouses. Every time you read a divine text, you’ll gain
more. Once we’ve learned something about, say, mortgage offices, we notice them
when we drive down the street; once we learn how a car works, we listen when
somebody says he has car trouble; if your kid has special needs, you notice the
news reports about it. You can only learn what you already know. And you know
what you know by minding your business. Every man should seek confluence, yes,
and also, as Voltaire advises, we should “each tend his own garden.” What can
this mean? Every man and woman must compromise much to fit in with society. We
cannot get what we want all the time. So let us have that private little space,
the little bit of triangle where we can behave or misbehave, do as we desire,
do whatever the hell we want. Like the middle-class dad at his grill, and kids
don’t bother him, dad’s busy –perhaps it is instinctual to respect the man or
woman who looks very focused – then he is fully in the zone, he’s focused, he’s
alive, real, in touch with the world.
Touch your world. Own your property. Own little, but really own it.
Moderate riches carry you, great riches you must carry. Have it too easy and
who cares? As William James said, “things reveal themselves sooner to those who
most passionately want them, for our need sharpens our wit.” Being rich, we
must be servant to our riches, being poor we must be servant to our poverty;
but the golden mean is to have enough money to not worry about money. The man
who has too many friends must be a friend always, and not be himself. Alone
time is sacred. The man who hasn’t enough friends is in the company of his lack
of friends, and feels lonely. Better to be moderate in all but that one thing.
Do not be too good, be not a virtuous ox, or, if you are such a one, if you are
the “camel” which Nietzsche spoke of, who disciplines himself to obey, then you
must become the lion and destroy your god, before you can be the child and create. You must not have too
much or you will blunt your desire, like Siddhartha who was so spoiled as a
prince that his greatest wish was to die and never come back. He was destined
at birth to be either a great warrior or a great Buddha. But what chance did
the plush boy have at war? His will and wish had been blunted. When Aladdin
rubbed the lamp to make his wish, the scene was pure masturbatory fantasy with
the spermatic Djinn to answer his wishes. Wishing comes to nothing, having
comes to nothing, but having some and seeking more is the way – he who has will
be given more! And a man who is rich in his mind but financially ruined will
make himself rich again, can never settle down and be content with poverty. If
good books are the best friends, seek those few inexhaustible books, those
incarnate gods, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet,
which Harold Bloom called “poem unlimited” and labeled Hamlet the
“lyrical-souled man who one wants to hear speak not only on these things, but
all things.” So let us dine on great books and great idea, the cure-alls and
panaceas, the ideas that life is in creating life, that we ought to grow
always, that each man’s potential is infinite, that “as God is, so we may
become,” that we may outdistance God, and expand as wide as the entire Universe
herself.
Therefore, though we articulate Allism as a philosophy, we experience it
as a religion. We seek to feel one with the All, and know we have achieved this
when we feel the mania of creative exuberance. Popular music celebrates the
manias and depressions of romantic love, religions celebrate the divine mania,
and we too celebrate these, take them for what they are worth, and look to
their use for our own creative enlargement. We must feel down at times, bitter
at our enemies, betrayed by our friends, bedridden, diseased—and so? Find a way
to be grateful in all things. Consider every matter unfinished until you can
give thanks for it. Life is beautiful! All is good! When you lack, prepare; but
when you have it, use it. Work when you have the jism of inspiration. Every
mood has its use; when you can predict your high moments, schedule your
greatest tasks upon them. Then you expand and demand more space. Create your
private garden, your Zen garden of creative space. Use a big work area, a wide
table, many notebooks, banner paper to write wide your ideas, a map as wide as
America – feel the stretch of your limbs! The butterfly is the type for us all!
We are graceful because we make space for ourselves. I am a monarch in the
wind. And thus I use the principle of abundance, of excess and selection. I
make more food than I’ll eat, I write more words than I’ll use, I cut more
figures than I’ll place, so that I have more than I need, and can have the
choice of the best. Many are called, few are chosen. Emerson said “A rush of
thoughts is the only conceivable prosperity that can come to us,” and as the
wise orator knows, you should take the best tropes and slogans of even your
enemies, and make them serve your own purposes. Constantly compound your
connections, make your mind thick. Let the circle of selection hold a wide
number of ideas, pull a few into the square of focus, and squeeze them tight
into a compact idea. Consider Emerson with his hundreds of volumes of daily
ideas, from which he distilled his essays; consider Whitman with his “Sea” of
notes and notebooks scattered around his study, from which he simmered and
boiled his poems; consider Edison, with his 30,000 notebooks, from which he
patented more inventions than any man before or since; consider Charles Ives
with his constant writing of symphonies, even after working a full-time
insurance job by which he would earn his millions, compounding his symphonies
with further musical ideas, till they were thick as blood.
The place you create is therefore perfect, absorbs the glow of your
flow, and is haunted forever after with ecstatic whispers. Your place is the
throne of importance, your body the world tree, your words the binding of time,
your thoughts the language of literature. Be true to yourself and you will make
world literature. As Whitman said “Few are aware how Great Literature
penetrates all, gives a hue to all, shapes aggregates and individuals, and
after subtle ways, with irresistible power, constructs, sustains, and
demolishes at will.” What higher goal could we have? This literature, this
creation, this is our resurrected body, waiting for us after we leave this
stage of life, the rainbow bridge which future generations may come to our
heaven. Therefore, defend your writing trysts. They are your moments of
innocence, as insistent as the knock upon the door of your apotheosis.
Revere your place. Hamlet insanely considered his insanity a front. As
wonderful as were his words, he ought to have been true to himself, to know his
real intentions and actual power. In the hands of a playwright, he is immortal,
but by his own guide he dies. Be sane. Keep your tools clean. Use excessive
precautions in protecting your work. Waste plastic in wrapping your clay, save
your computer files in three separate places, fill endless notebooks full of
ideas. Your hands are divine, the oil of your fingertips the Midas touch. Be
neurotic about follow through, keep your place sacred, permit no intruders.
Before you go to bed, lay out your morning. If midnight is your creative time,
then finish every duty and chores by nine. Keep your work hidden, permit no
peepers. Never share a half-finished work. The WE of the female, the us of the
universe, must be defied by the ME of the male, the pride of the ego who keeps
his best hidden until it is grown so compound, and thick, and perfect, that it
is irresistible in the way only a god can be, for the only genuine proof of any
God is that we can’t not believe in him--nor can beauty be denied. Share your
errors, hide your pride.
We must balance Me, Focus must balance Selection. Focus
fails without variation of choice. You can only hear something so many times
before it becomes mere noise. If your dad scolds you for your mistake, he can
only scold you a moment before your mind goes flat from it; but let the mind
dip away from the topic at hand, and it can again see freshly the old idea.
Ideas are braided, a careful knit brings the thread under and then back up
again. William James noted that we can only focus on a thing for a moment, and
then must cease. Einstein could concentrate for hours on the same problem, and
his forebear Newton was the same; perhaps deep problems require this obsessive
focus. But even Newton gave up focusing on one thing, say, upon gravity, and
would switch over to thinking of light, and then from light to some other, for
we all can only focus on one topic until our interest in it is spent. As we
reprieve, that interest fills back up as if by hidden vesicle. The Tao tells us
that “The sage lacks a set mind, and so sets everyone’s mind,” and this might
even be true, except that the sage knows how to set upon one idea for long
periods of time, and finally defines it—that at least is fully Western. He isn’t set before he arrives:
in this he is innocent. And so we must be both obsessive and fresh, both
consistent and inconsistent. You can only see what you already know. I didn’t
notice how my coworkers made cakes until I had read something on my own about
how cakes are made; after that, the details for their work shown starkly before
me.
Theory comes first. Before we are ready to become something, we must
first praise it. No work, no gain. Yet I am not going to work unless I am
certain of that gain. Whitman, when at the age of apotheosis, a ripe 35,
prepared to write the Leaves of Grass
by intently studying Emerson’s Essays,
and then wrote at length, theorizing the nature of the ideal poet. Having done
this, he could then well become it. He had the power to become because he had
first worked. And just as he had worked as a newspaper editor for years, and
had internalized the practice of cutting and pasting newspaper articles, so too
did he cut and paste his own poems, he set aside envelopes, each standing for
“spinal ideas,” and slipped bits of poesy into them, later to gross-structure
them into full out poems. In the same way, Ayn Rand had prepared herself for a
disastrous love affair with the charmingly charismatic and absurdly arrogant
Nathanael Brandon by first fantasizing such a scene upon her character Dagney
Taggart, whose progress in the novel Atlas
Shrugged was is to pass like a poker chip from one businessman to the next.
Fantasy is preparation. How much thought it takes to make a little move of the
finger. A ton of theory is necessary to produce an ounce of practice. “It is
the work of ages to make a tiny flower.” Yet it is worth the toil: spoil your
muse, fatten her on fine literature. She will repay you. Cheap goods cost us
the most, so do not spare the money and effort to secure true value. For we
fashion our heaven from the brick of experience, and mortar eternity with the
cement of choice. I have written mood music to write by, drawn inspiring
drawings for my walls, founded a religion to focalize my gratitude, made a
world to swallow me up in my own genius, so my work could finally be my own.
Freedom and Independence are the artist’s lust. I give my greatest works for
free. Who is rich enough to take them?
Each writer leaves behind a hint. A book is a window. You hold now a
portal to my soul; these words are the venetian blinds between us. Dare to bend
them open, I await within. In the same way, I have joined the heaven of other
authors, if for only a moment, for I know that the place of happiness is trust,
and I will take the author as worthy of my focus and care. I will trust him.
What we do here forever repeats itself, for we take Nietzsche’s formulation of
the Eternal Recurrence as the most optimistic metaphysics yet, a metaphysic if
taken to heart which can optimize this life like no other.
Therefore, I give life gratitude, and choose my friends well, and call
my own by name. Emerson is dear to me: strike the man and watch me bleed. As
nightly sacrament I read Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, James; I take as best
friends Walden, Moby Dick, the Scarlett Letter, the Essays of Emerson, Pragmatism, How We Think.
I balance these again against the Tao Te
Jing, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil,
The Logos of Heraclitus, the Eddas, and the Gospel of Thomas.
I praise my acquaintances; for the friends of my life, I am rude to very
few, only to the ones I like best. I merely need to care a bit, to take men and
women for what they are, and not expect them to be different, “Be content with
contentment, and how content you will be!” I show enthusiasm and admiration
where I can, and don’t mind if I am a bit unjustified. I can afford to be
generous. The few I make intimate are ever dear. You are as gods to me. My
heart is a rose to your sunny face, and I feel the same glow with your approval
that I feel when the Motherverse splits her heart and bleeds light from its
inner sun upon my adoring brow. I am simpler than my beliefs, subtler than my
theories. Desires are prayers. I desire so little from the world, I could stack
my wants as neatly as a pile of books. If I dabble my brush in complexity, it
is in the spirit of dissonance, like Ives, to evaporate sentimentality. I give,
with no assurance of gratitude, am clever as Mendel who presented his genetics
as a university thesis, and yet failed to impress.
Praise your friends, ignore your enemies. Those I love I will encourage
and admire; those farther away, who criticize my work and life, I treat with
the same aloofness as Emerson when his “Divinity Address” was attacked in the
newspaper: no response was necessary. When you are with, no criticism can reach you. Only the flowing and pauseless is
natural and perfect. Only what you do every day is truly yours. Only what
you've been doing your whole life can you achieve with grace. Until my mortal
knot is cut, I will ever advance my goals. I let the each flow into the all,
and that is beauty; I let the all flow into each, and that is sublime. Through
the layers of abstraction, we connect every episode of our life into our
overall biography, and that again to the biography of Man, to the human race,
and that finally to the Universe in her grand unfolding. When the each
transfigures so that its outer form mirrors its inner form, then can the
universe fill it, and it in turn can internalize the All-form.
For people like us, whose rhetoric is madness, whose minds are a bit
touched, we must remember to be ironical and humble.
Behind my
jester's cap
Vast
intelligence
I am stupid
for your,
As stupid as
you please
I suffer your
tease
But only for
show
I study the
shallowness of your god
that
circumference of your life
Or if he is
deep, I discover his name
and sound out
how deep he goes
I dive into my
own centermost
and kiss the
lips of my outermost,
my wife and
lover.
I've been to
hell, in spirit and in body
Have tasted
her flame and felt her sting
Was no Dante
Voyeur,
but belonged
to her and ate from her tray
I embraced
her, and called her womb glorious.
The seed of greatness is small. Perhaps the tiniest of mindseeds lies
behind all this fun talk. After Transcendentalism, Pragmatism; after
Pragmatism, Allism; and Allism is now bound and bundled in a fine singularity.
Learn, therefore, a simple magic over yourself. Become with me
psychotic. Half mad, but organized. I consider the office supply store the most
philosophical of stores; it teaches how to compartmentalize everything into its
place. If you are madly creative, seek the self-discipline of utter order.
Use icons, trinkets, and baubles to set the boundary around a creative
space. Recall the circle of candles which, in the imagination of ancient
diviners, prevented demons from penetrating. A quote, a picture, some sort of
personal symbol can put you in mind of a place, if only you honor the symbol
and use it consistently. The essence of magic is consistent use of names.
With the creative engagement and the intimacy of transfiguration, you
achieve that dissociative state where your surroundings dissolve and your
project becomes all. This is true religion. This is transfiguration. You must
learn to knock on the door of your apotheosis.
Absorb your world if you would make worlds. Reinterpret all your
culture's symbols into your own. Know what is sacred to your culture, and do
not waste your time with iconoclasm unless it can justify your efforts.
Consecrate your tools; keep them clean, keep them sharp. Consider any expense
upon your tools as justified.
The mystic celebrates his private initiation into the deeper meanings of
his religions. Perhaps he first had a Bible verse leap out upon him like a
miracle (as when Augustine hearkened to the chatty church bells, telling him to
read a letter Paul wrote) and so to take those books and rites as given, as
sacred, before their unconscious could divine hidden meanings in them. It
doesn't matter at all what the starting material is, it could be anything,
only, it must mean something to you,
you cannot fake it, you cannot find a deep meaning in what you believe to be of
small importance. Insofar as you can, you will be focused on your own
cleverness, and the effect is lost. You must be able to find something you can
be real with, something you can genuinely revere. You need a lifelong
familiarity with a thing before you can realize its inner structure. Only those
questions you've struggled with your whole life can you finally answer. The
idea that we will be given wisdom "in the twinkling of the eye"
without first struggling with a problem for decades is inhuman, unnatural, and
if holding any moral value at all, it would be evil, the work of a soul
destroyer. The only real truth a man can hold is one which emerged from his
innermost. You grow when you are alone. The secret to happiness is to realize
that you are already happy; the secret to wisdom is to realize what you've
known all along.
And so, I'm in love with life! How great is life, and worthy of love! Oh
Ama, the American muse, whose Saliva is Emerson, his breath is Whitman; Ama you
are my own, and you present Mattria for our adoration.
How all the world transfigures when I drink the Tao of crystal water
from my long-stemmed glass -- pure kiss of her lips. Joseph Smith was told to
use water for the Sacrament, but failed to understand why. But we know that
blood does not wash sins. They would cleanse gore with gore! Love, and you will
not have sinned in the first place. We baptize ourselves in the shower each
day, drinking of it, not to wash ourselves of sins, but to wash ourselves of
the world's dirt. Our categorical imperatives are the empty absolutes to always do what you think is right, and Seek self-fulfillment in all things. These
are useful, and empty, and useful because they are empty, for any personal
morality may fit into them, and yet all of them must bend to the absolute of
your honest judgments and real needs. True freedom has absolute limits; lacking
that, it wouldn't be free. There is no freedom in the arbitrary. We wash
ourselves of any influence the world holds over us, of what doesn't add to our
own perfection.
Therefore, since we are half-mad day-dreamers, we use the Kantian
regularity in structuring our days -- OCD and utterly boring, to the spying
neighbor. Never permit exceptions. Be able to do that, to never rationalize,
and your will is stronger than God, wider than time, greater than space. Set
your rules, set your routine, and repeat it thoroughly, until the external
structure is stable enough to be your second body.
Use a few icons, a few triggers, and actively hallucinate. Your eyes are
hands that paint the world. Overlay the world with your imagination, learn how
to hallucinate when you read, as did the Nash character in the movie a Beautiful Mind, where the words off
the newspaper would stand out like a stereoscopic drawing, pick themselves right
of the page, and scout themselves to the peripheral, for later consideration.
If nobody is looking at you, mime a bit. When you are actively handling
ideas, pick them up as if they were objects. Dance with them. Shuffle them into
place. A little dance, a little miming, this allows you think with your body.
Choose a scripture, hopefully something holier than the Bible, and study
it as critically, heartfully, and carefully as possible. Read it slowly, read
it repeatedly. Great writers use the affirmative. Seek them out. Mattria
inspires all words, Sophia Lux, the
sun of her tongue, is in all language. We who are set apart to make symbols --
what rites of initiation you will intuit from me! -- know how to use
translogical thinking, combining antagonisms into one object, the way the sloth
is my totem for mania, and the raccoon my totem for honesty. The more you
desire a thing, the less you can have it. That rule your power makes for
itself, that it will never beg. As love resembles hate, so too do all things contain
their opposites, and in their extremes, merge again with what they oppose. Too
much morality looks like vice, too fit a body falls into illness. The raccoon
and the monarch butterfly are dear to me for the complicated natures they
present, for how they present best what I am after in my work. The flight of
the monarch is the essence of my periodical style, the alteration between
flutter and glide, a bit of bustle and then the smooth knife sweep in long
gaunt swoops.
Evoke your symbols in your words, savor your symbols in your creative
space. Reconfigure your shelves and tools with each project you take under.
When you are away from your creative space, do not mentally leave it, remain
there all day, making mental notes. Such notes require resonantly naming
things, at least in your subvocalized voice; break things down into a simple
series, and imaginatively integrate those parts into one symbol or story. The
great myths and fables did this well, and will therefore always be with us.
Recall also the geometrical symbols for the mind; the mind is your first and
primary creative space, for the square of focus is the square of independence
is the square of imposed order. The triangle of creativity is also in the point
of each of your fingers. The circle of selection is also the world circle, the
circle of your daily cycles and routines. The triangle, the square, and the
circle are the structuring geometries of your inner I.
Your friends you will have always. Treat them well. A community arises
for the mutual assistance of its members. We each seek our apotheosis, and yet
seek a second apotheosis of the God that is us together. Long probationary
periods, attention to how friends handle temptations, how they reveal
themselves, these safeguards are wise to use to slowly win them over to our
trust.
I write these words with every living breath of my day, yet I set them
down into the Idius on the 8th day of the week, after midnight each night, in
the womb of my office, which I nickname, "hell" -- for it is such
bliss to me. Nevertheless, this is not my only sacred place, but the public
library, the university library, these are my true churches, and I visit them
often. I look at the window of this library, at the grassy field, with wind
running through it like invisible horses, and I consider my goals in life, and
feel as certain of them as a man feels when he is seducing a woman who objects
and argues against seduction, and belies the fact that she can be seduced by the
very attempt to rationalize a "no" against it. Being certain of his
goal, the rest is mere delay, a play, a game. I feel the same of my intent. I
have already succeeded, now I must just dodge and dance a few transitory
obstacles.
Ama Lynn, Everything, Starlight of my sky! Stillness of the dark,
brighter than sight. Ama gave me Emerson, Ama gave me America, Ama taught me
the American language, her firefull wings alighted on my brow. The woman who
will become you in the next rotation, she made me man, and taught me Father
Emerson, both father and yet son to me, she took something from me which I
would give to no other. She laughed for the child, Sophia Lux, and again for
Satan her dear daughter. I learned it all well and never ceased my love.
Sophia, or philosophy itself, the intermixing of Sophia Lux and Hermes Logos,
which is the core of all language, and language the glow of philosophy, is in
all my days in everything, as if work and family and chores were big blocks,
with little creative space to crawl, except that philosophy was the Tao fluid
and poured in every crack and cranny, and permeated the whole. Philosophy seeps
in every moment of my life.