Love (Or, Systematically Murdering Something Pretty)

What is love? 'Pends on your preference.

Love can be reduced to its neurological-somatological (brain-body) processes. The flighty feelings that make y'heart feel all fluttery 'n such. Etc.

Or, it can be a form of seeing -- seeing the whole person without particulars, beyond the particulars (hands, smile, hair, temper, distaste, etc.).

Or, will-to-good (or bene-volence).

Fundamentally, however, love is founded in relation.

I'll take all four, personally. The second is a requisite; the third is its fulfillment; the first is its result; the fourth is the entire process.

"I love you," that is, "I see you, will the best for you, and am rewarded biologically because of this." Willing the best, oftentimes, means nothing more than seeing -- and seeing entails the language expressed by the one seen.

Of course, love often doesn't mean this. Love as affection can mean the simple affective responses associated with external stimulii. A boy who watches a man work on his garden every sunday may feel affection for him without even having relation with him. This form of love can quite often be based on a particular, partciularly behavioristically: the person doesn't always love the person in his or her entirety, but an aspect of them (their smile, something in their history). Or, love may mean friendship, in which case two individuals come together unintentionally through their intersecting points of interest: they both like bowling -- and so they spend time together by virtue of this shared interest. Erotic love is the love people "fall" in, the love that breaks hearts, inspires poetry (and bitchiness). There is a higher form, though, that I consider unconditional.

Most of these loves overlap. Erotic love necessarily entails affection, and oftentimes friendship (but think of marriages centuries ago wherein both partners were planned together; their roles in marriage were more functional than affectively related). Friendship doesn't always have to involve affection (which is typically why we care less for our friends than for our families). The interesting thing is that the highest love -- which I can think only in the religious form of agapas -- can live without any of the other three forms. This form of love is love constituted and sustained through the nakedness of one's will. That is to say, agapas is the will in the will-to-good of benevolence. Without it, love limits itself to spontaneity; the person loves because his inclinations force these feelings on him. His love is limited to his mood, in short.

So, love has typically one of four forms at least, though oftentimes these forms can overlap. These forms differ in their makeup: affection and erotic love are often primarily based in neurological-somatological processes; they are the loves that "grab" you before you think of grabbing them. Friendship is more spiritual, if you will; it can and often does exist without an affective base, mostly because friendship is a byproduct of shared interests. The highest love, unconditional love, love with a will, agapas, is, yes, what keeps these three lower loves alive. Spontaneous love is determined love; determined love can just as easily turn to hatred -- unless a will is present. And not just any will -- a will that wills a the paradox of selflessness: resigning oneself for the sake of another, only after which one gains the happiness through the sustained being of these other three lower loves.

--

Yes, there are times where I can soak up nothing, where even the quintessence of beauty standing before me seems like Jupiter, foreign, remote; where the presence of other human beings is too exhausting, and keeping up a conversation is nothing less than self-torture. Instances have pain -- downright physical pain; a sort of crushing against my temples, but far too light to be a headache, yet still infinitely heavier. All self-written words, like these here, are considered worthless, rubbish, evidence of ineptitude that the world has never seen. Books clutter around, auspicious titles, tantalizing subjects, but my mind is so strung out with intertia that after ten lines I'm ready to die. All that is left is a dark, ur-meditative, nihilistic stare where everything frowns at me with emptiness, and weakness pours through my veins, and all I want to do is sleep.

What is this?

No, the situations are rare, thankfully. Yet in this exact situation, or even on a pathway towards it, still lightyears away, most anyone seduced by the dark manna of the world would do anything to escape it. I don't want to escape it. It makes me sick to think of escaping it; yet I still know that I am free, terribly free, to do so. At times I find myself personifying this disease by literally verbally speaking to it and the open air: "you will not win; I am stronger; try your best". Suddenly the air seems a little lighter, and a fighting smile paints my lips. But soon things return. I do have the choice, don't I? I can channel this negation onto the outer world. I can hate, or feign impatience, manipulate others, lose myself in substances, ad infinitum. Better, I can perpetuate the lie of appearance by throwing myself into a crowd of dead souls, garnering their attention, living in the shelter of a facade. I can do all this. But I don't. I hold it in.

Listen. I am completely powerless. I have sway over nothing. Everything passes me by, and like a foot-locked near-stowaway I can't make the minimal leap onto the slow-moving train of the world. Absolutely nothing heals. Nothing. But I still have a choice. I can suffer, or destroy. A single drop of malevolence microscopically curses the entire cosmic net, and God knows it is too often the breaking point for other breaking selves. So, perhaps half-madly, I ask -- without even knowing what I am asking, here, this moment -- one thing. Appreciate me. No, I can live well enough without you; I am not seeking your admiration. But am I not, through my voluntary suffering, keeping the world a little brighter than it could be, and are you not a member of this rusty little world?

Can you do the same?

Alone

To be alone is far greater than to be surrounded by a cloud of everything and still feel loneliness. God hides behind both the solitary and the multifarious. But one distracts. Damnation is a will-to-distraction.

Two Points

One: the room congregationally shared with collegiate cognitive landmines. Professors. Six or seven, mingled in with our sitting lackadaisical class, for the most part observing, for one doctor's part analytically crucifying, a potential, a candidate to fill the shoes of one of the four of our department's retiring souls, who spoke with a disappointing southern lisp that I knew would be the straw that broke the camel's back of her acceptance. How tall and terrifying a feeling, and how revelatory, to share the ground with these intelligentsia, these profound looking men and women who seem to have forgotten, some in their selfless childish fascination with the world, others in the vice that comes with proportionate knowledge, that they too are flesh and blood, potential suicides, potential saints. I held myself and observed, and travailed the demonic desires that shuffled my bones: at intervals to run away, at others to laugh, at others to sleep, at others to be.

Two: verging on a solitary warm midnight at the apex of a four hour reading marathon, composed of the lofty, unattainable gorgeousness of Nabokov in the form of his immortal Lolita, and the hard-knit, still poetic, nearing-insanity quips of William Burroughs regarding the seventeen million cats he's owned in his lifetime. Suddenly, the muse resurrects, reverberates; my brain is tickled with that especial stimulation that can only be sustained through creativity. The eternal walk to the computer. The exorcising and expunging of a legion of demons that had accumulated for the last two months in my just previously stale-stuffed soul. Word after word after word. The warmth that grazed my heart. The smile I felt coming, that I supressed, hurriedly grabbing my near-dead pipe, to an outdoor wonderland tranfixed under the moonless sky. The smile that I set free, cascading my body with pinpricks of angelic joy. The smoke specters that emanated from my mouth. The festive relaxation of gods.

Between Nabokov and the Rain

Uneventful days don't exist; our eyes are simply poorly opened. The rain trickles down, stubbornly, coldly, like a mismarried spouse's manipulative stare. I'm not intelligent enough to wear real shoes. I will be sick again. She -- she glows in the falling rain, huddled under a salvific overpass, at the front of this lifeless crowd of eight or nine, like an angel leading a moveless walk towards paradise. Her hands are small. Her face is saving a secret smile. I walk through the entrance doors and it's like the whole world is morosely insulated: senilely bent over computers, passionlessly half-absorbed in useless studies, some in near-catatonic stares, eyes weeping with a whispering confession: why today? why today? I can't decide who is worse off: those so clearly affected by the infinite freezing raindrops, or those few, like the slow-typing black girl sitting with an empty stare next to me, who seem completely undiluted, unchanged, as if nothing at all were happening around them, and life itself is nothing more than letting the machine work itself in perpetuity. Until, of course, that one day when the system dies from fatigue and the dust from decomposition reveals a life utterly wasted, the tragic revelation too late for an ascertaining mind that there really was potential here. For to be human, if one were to judge on the basis of how the world is, means to waste oneself, to bide one's time until the eternal N/A is stamped on the nonentities that once breathed the air God had firsted breathed into being.

Not a smile in sight. It's as if happiness were ashamed of the faces it held. Still style holds its sway: logos and flashy clothes glitter throughout space, still the narcoleptic attempt to make oneself shine, hold oneself right, walk with a little forced dignity. My face is unshaven, my eyes are burning, the whole world is exhausted, drowned in listlessness, and even though it seems that everything is wrong -- even though, the whole world brims with perfection, and nothing at all needs be changed. Even darkness has its own secret light.

Epiphany

It was an hour after your splendor broke me
That I found myself alone in a cloud of ghosts.
Some anonymous place, where fake-lights drizzled down,
Grazing the warm summer night walkways,
Overtaken by cricket songs and dying winds,
I walked my way unhurried, viscous-stepped,
Thinking of the worlds of your warmish eyes.
At intervals the selves around were born,
At intervals I was born in love in them.
A man unknown was sitting at the square
With a violin, tearing through the shadowed clouds above,
And suddenly the point was touched
Where intoxication reached its peak and the world
Emanated with a burning, glowing wonder:
As I listened,
To him, the crickets, souls of strangers,
The pale wind, the whispering night,
And the sigh of God that blessed it all
I grasped at last what made you shine,
And I hurried once more to the sanctuary
That held your holy smile.

And the East Seared Me

Why the laughter, why the joy,
When flames are ever burning?
Surrounded by darkness,
Shouldn't you search for light?
-- The Dhammapada (v. 146)

Quote

"A sincere faith. What more loathsome combination is possible than love -- and falsity! Yet this combination is impossible, for to love falsely is to hate. This is true not only of falsity, but it is impossible to reconcile the least lack of honesty with loving. As soon as there is a lack of honesty, there is also something concealed. In this concealment hides selfish self-love, and inasmuch as this is present in a man he does not love. In honesty the lover presents himself before the beloved. No mirror is as accurate as honesty in catching the smallest trifle, if it is true honest, or if the lovers express themselves with true faithfulness in the mirror of honesty which love holds between them.

But if two people can thus in honesty become transparent to each other, is it not somewhat arbitrary of Christianity to talk about sincere faith in another sense, insofar as it thereby means honesty before God? If two people are to love each other in sincere faith, is not a prior requirement in each individual of honesty before God just what is needed? Is it dissimulation only when a man consciously deceives others or himself? I wonder if it is not also dissimulation when a man does not know himself. And can such a person promise love out of sincere faith, or can he -- hold to what he promises? To be sure he can, but if he cannot promise, can he hold to what he cannot even promise? And a person who does not know himself cannot promise love out of sincere faith." -- Kierkegaard

Power

Imagine you are the most important human being alive. Let's say you're the Wittgenstein of your time. Everyone palpably knows your name will go down in history, that you have contributed heavily to whatever field you specialize in, that you have a ridiculously broad knowledge (the "last remaining Renaissance man") in all areas of life; you can assimilate everything into unity; you are the solution for the question of where mankind should be going. Added to this, you know how to silence your enemies; your intelligence is incomparable. Your name paints the cover-pages of the most auspicious magazines of this generation; Time has held your portrait more than once. Your friends almost fall prostrate before you with their admonitions; more: you are quite the character to be around. Women adore you. In short, you are history, and you, in your youth, in ascertaining this fact, extract all the euphoria involved with such a discovery: most geniuses throughout history never know their own place until -- they are dead.

Then something fantastic happens. The aliens finally land, and Sagan leaps from his grave. They land, and, moreover, bring a master-race of human beings with them. They have learned the tricks of God, you could say, and have discovered how to work the genetics of human evolution. They have quite literally grown a master race, fashioned after their super-intelligence, their ten-thousand year advance in technology, the natural sciences, and other disciplines. The world, following the leads of the governments of America and England, enthusiastically accepts the integration of these individuals into society: they will, after all, solve our mathematical, theological, scientific, pharmacological, medical, philosophical, and political problems. Diseases will be reduced to history. This race is a genius: a preternatural gift from a preternatural discovery: the aliens, after all, are nice. Every problem humanity has encountered has been solved. Things are well for everyone.

But not for you. You come to realize that this race, oh history incarnated, surpasses your genius at every single infinitesimal angle. There isn't a single member of these super-humans that this is remotely approximate to you in intelligence. In firebranded despair, you search every angle of this race for a single exception; but there is none. You have suddenly become one-millionth place. You are no longer exceptional. You are clumped with the rest of humanity, significantly no different than the lowest mind, given the ridiculous leap these super-geniuses have over the human race (statistics has no mercy). You are no longer spoken of behind closed doors; the magazines dedicate their time to the far more conspicuous advances of the just-landed super-race. Your friends still look on you with positivity, but there is a strange reflective pause in their eyes. They admired you because you were the best; but now you're no-one. A negligible grain of flesh. Power, you come to find, is the greatest metaphysical bastard to ever live.

Yes, I must say that if your emphasis is on power, I can only call you stupid. Why waste your time? Your life is relativity, devoid of anything absolute, anything immutable. What is the absolute for a human being? His meaning. Meaning is relative to the individual, yes, but absolute in relation to this individual. Power is both relative to the individual and to his relation to other men. For this reason, I cannot trust you, Nietzsche; I cannot trust the ideal man, the Ubermench, as a man of power, who lives in the hope of an unending struggle for superiority, no matter how expedient this drive is in answering an objectively meaningless universe for the human beings thrown into it. I can't, in part because I find a correlation between people who seek power and assholedness. Yes, and it may very well be that invisible sting that evokes the assholedness of those who seek to overcome the world. The world is a much better place without assholes; therefore, whatever means to reducing this is a preferable aim. Even if this involves resigning one's "selfishness". Perhaps in that last glimmer of sanity you grasped this, as you flocked towards that abused horse in Turin, contradicting your anti-pity philosophy through a substitution with your own hidden sparkling humanity, embracing that abused animal with a breaking mind. You were too grand a human being to limit yourself to pettiness, and it is the greatest tragedy that imbeciles far outweigh the noble souls in relation to those who claim to follow you.

Power, that is, an intoxicating feeling analogous to religious experience -- a secular substitute for religious euphoria, but based, alas, in unstable ground. No shock that paranoid schizophrenics are characterized by delusions of grandeur in addition to hallucinations. Could one make the amateur case that the one causes other rather than limiting one's explanation to purely boring biological grounds? Not likely, but perhaps; there are many culprits in causality, for causality is synthetic, not singular.

You live for power you say, you poor bastard. You have instrumentalized the entire world, dehumanized the saints and ghosts we call human beings that hide inside, dissipated beauty (what greater absurdity to think that Napoleon knew beauty!). Is there anything intrinsic? Anything you perceive for its own sake? Ah, I see your repsonse: that even if through consciousness one thinks one has a moment of exhileration or exuberance, you would say we must look deeper to a biological basis, an unconscious, Id-saturated groping for overcoming -- that, you say, is a response to any intrinsic experience; all is instrumental except the telos of power by virtue of a necessary biological drive. So much the worse for you.

So much the worse for you.

I was Thinking Neruda

I miss her. That pretty little girl
Whose heart rings out into the world.
The one I miss even when she's standing
Firm-footed before my wishing eyes.
Retrace your steps.

Love Fearlessly

To love a human being in the deepest sense, to love before you ascertain the qualities of his or her character, to transcend the shabby preferences of adoration, to love without preference, to love in such a way where appreciation blooms as an aftereffect rather than a limitation before the involuntary binge -- this love is missing. Love without a will -- that is missing. Involuntary love -- this is why marriages break down, friendships crumble, old affections consistently precipitate in clashes.

The deepest of love is so remarkable a thing that it gives rise to multiple responses. Try it. Go into the world and love a human being before you grasp any of his "hard-earned" particulars, and admit to him that you loved him in this sense, unconditionally. If he is fit for this world, he will reciprocate with a dark stare; if he is attached to this world, he could very well hate you. Thus the test of love in relation to the world is its negative response. Love for this world means the confusion of nonbeing for being. Nonbeing, that is, the particulars that constitute the person, not the ineffable heart that holds this constitution together. Only the person who loves the eternal secret of the other can have his love resonate to the other's whole being. For the deepest love is a secret too secret for itself. It flies from the heart of the lover and plants a seed whose results the lover does not know. He only intends the goodness of the seed. Blooming in different ways, for some it is an added wonder to a perspective flooded by the celestial adoration of life; for others it is a mysteriously iridescent reason to keep on living -- if only for now. Human love is the birthing God in the soul, and what blossoms is God's enterprise.

Can love give rise to ill-temperment, brooding, even hatred? Yes -- but only the highest sort of love, unconditional love, that loves not on the basis of contingencies of personality (for all personalities, whether or not one would like to admit it, are contingent), but on essence -- on the realization of the divine "I" that is shared by all. Men prefer to be loved on the basis of their perceived excellencies, though these excellencies are often nothing more than qualities accepted and molded without effort by those who have them. Love thus understood is a transmission of mutual factual admiration. Individuals who demand to be loved in this sense, in this inferior sense, seek such because their ambition prevents a cleansed perception into the simplicity of living: that is, loving, unconditionally, perpetually, everyone and everything, for to love beyond qualities is precisely to love everyone -- and everything. Love of life, too, is a great leap before perception settles itself.

Unconditional love is fearless love. We must love fearlessly. Virtually all human beings have relational difficulties that cause them to perceive something that isn't there: a fairly conspicuous smile falsely perceived to be made in derision, a shake of the hand too strong, a look in the eyes that resembles unappreciation. What we must seek is to outrule these unintentional relational obscurities, and we can accomplish this only by loving fearlessly. Imagine a man filled to the brim with the hardness of life to such a degree where he no longer sees hardness juxtaposed with life, but only hardness. On his last transitory relation with another human being, who he may or may not know, he perceives a sense of estrangement or neglect that isn't there, and he ends up killing himself, simply because this perceived exclusion from love was the final shot that knocked down his already trembling house of cards he knew to be his general sense of hope in this world. Who is the guilty one? I say, there are many culprits, not one, though the sufficient one was that of timidity, emitted by the man who wasn't big enough to love magnanimously.

In Memory of Youth

As children we prayed with silent faces
To our calender deities, each day
toward May an added angle to our smiles.
The freedom that killed away the same,
Away from school, away from pain,
To be baptised by the crushing sun,
Drenched by the whispering water
Of summer, God's words in disguise --
That eternal waiting was our work.
All the rest was easy peasy.

Now we work incessantly, devoid
Of that bright glitter of hope we once held
In younger smiling eyes. Poor wasted world.
The point was meant another way:
That by working part-time
We should retire early, not abstracted
From life, but in love with all,
The pain entailed, for we could then unveil
Its face as the test of happiness.
Where did we go wrong?

End with a Bang

"What is talkativeness? It is the result of doing away with the vital distinction between talking and keeping silent. Only some one who knows how to remain essentially silent can really talk -- and act essentially. Silence is the essence of inwardness, of the inner life. Mere gossip anticipates real talk, and to express what is still in thought weakens action by forestalling it. But someone who can really talk, because he knows how to remain silent, will not talk about a variety of things but about one thing only, and he will know when to talk and when to remain silent. Where mere scope is concerned, talkativeness wins the day, it jabbers on incessantly about everything and nothing. When people's attention is no longer turned inwards, when they are no longer satisfied with their own inner religious lives, but turn to others and to things outside themselves, where the relation is intellectual, in search of that satisfaction, when nothing important ever happens to gather the threads of life together with the finality of a catastrophe: that is the time for talkativeness . In a passionate age great events (for they correspond to each other) give people something to talk about. Talkativeness, on the contrary, has, in quite another sense, plenty to talk about. And when the event is over, and silence follows, there is still something to remember and to think about while one remains silent. But talkativeness is afraid of the silence which reveals its emptiness." -- Kierkegaard

Note

He shakes his hand but not mine, his entire stare a forced clinging to his eclipsing youth, sustained through his wit, sarcasm, and, sadly, unending flippancy. He constantly attempts to make all things funny, but thus desecrates the sacred. Does he not realize that humor is a means to filling in the gaps of the non-sacred moments of existence? I look at his truck: immaculate, enormous, expensive. He doesn't want to love. He wants to move up in this world.

Stream

To my left: artificial waterfall whir of the shower running in the other room. To my right: a fighting cicada, resisting repose, joined in by its partner at intervals to the front. Both sounds synthesize. Auricular wonder. In my heart: a raging, firebranded anger. Fade, fade. Neglected coffee cup. White, irregular state of Texas peering out at a hiding angle, the eastern lines blurred out by the overhead light. The shower stops now. The scrape of the shower curtain. The light sound of closing drawers. Cough -- cough. The cicada has stolen me again. Door opens. Belt buckle jingle. Another door closes, with a reluctant sqeak. Somehow, somehow, all is right with the world. The now discernable ticking of the clock ineffably tells why. As if in time with the heartbeat of God.

The coffee cup again; the braggart state again. Live in a state with squiggles, a comedian has said. Footsteps, hollow floor. A person. "I need to get my own alarm clock." Barely hoarse voice. Steps, receding. Someone forgot to feed the dog. She needs to go. A mistake -- too large. Bad judgement.

The coffee cup again. Three-hundred degree angle from me. Books behind the coffee cup. Two stacks, five and five, reciprocated with large volumes: Ulysses, left, bottom; The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, right, top. The door is open -- the cicadas pour through.

The anger is gone. But a problem lies beneath, backbone of negativity. A thought to muffle it. Her. To think, I haven't fallen in love in a while. Eyes burning............The clock again. Click. Click. Click.

Joyce isn't that breathtaking a writer. Why Nabokov praises him so much -- the words, he says: thirty-thousand original words. So what? Hickish words, pedestrian fusings. Snotgreen. Milkwhite. So what? Nothing special. Not like Vladimir.

The decayingly long route of publication. Took one from his early twenties to his mid-thirties before his attempts precipitated in a positive response, and still, he says, there are gems undiscovered, or cropped over by virtue of the excremental prose that gets published a hundred times in comparison with mediocrity. To think that being published is a necessarily high acheivement. In reality, a recognition of one's mediocrity. The high beyond the aesthetic powers of the crowd -- that is the foreign. The few appreciate the good that translates as foreign to the mediocre. All probability is against me. But the voice is insistent: write. Write. God wouldn't imply a lie, would He? Imply a lie. Beautiful.

World, you've stripped me. Terrifying to discover what is left when all earthly hopes have disappeared. A glimmer of divinity? Or nothing? I feel something. Look at the brilliant symmetrical reflection of the pyramid-dotted spherical light on the television. A light streaming out of a two-dimensional cave. Brilliant, impressive, but not beautiful. It can't be beautiful. It smacks of means.

Girl, girl, girl. You go to church incessantly; hardly a week without your presence. But why, hm, are all your pictures brimming with attractive people, "in" individuals, the accepted, the wealthy? A reason to sleep in on Sundays. Churches at the genesis of Christianity were safe-havens for individuals who wanted nothing more than to share divine interactions in an altruistic spirit. To rejoice over the faith of their equally persecuted comrades. Today church is just another social institution. Alcohol for the sober. Tradition regurgitated. Blessed are those who want something more.

I have an entire cosmic symphony with this clickety-clock, with these restless cicadas! The secret to life is this: become aware. The very greatest symphony of all may be found in silence. And the most profoundly deep individuals know how to find this silence in the midst of the very business of life.

Become as Children

"Truly I say to you, unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven." -- Matthew 18:3 (NASB, emphasis mine)

A man with the entire history of the ideas of philosophy incarnated on his actually infinite bookshelf without the gospels could never, in all his extraction from such texts, arrive at the shocking and eternally beautiful maxim Jesus holds: become as children. Children! If anything the world would force a conclusion that is the exact opposite: seek wealth, influence over others, power! Or the notorious barbaric stupidity accepted so innocently from once-innocent youths from their fathers: be a man! That is, throw your life to shit but be accepted doing it: that's all that counts. Be a man truly means be for others, which means: you are too unmanly, too unwilling to be a human being, to be yourself, for you cannot be a human being without being the being you are designed to be. Be a man means: be anything but a man; take the path of simplicity, never assert yourself in such a way that demands the pain necessary for sustaining your personality. Be a man: augment the physical, grow mad muscles, always waver between a stage of soberness and inebriation -- an existence that is actually better understood as being-towards-inebriation. Be a man, where everything is for the sake of "the weekend", "the sports game", "getting lucky", the dehumanization of women, the negation of pure relation with others, the perversion and instrumentation of the entire beautiful world, addiction, attachment, bondage, misery, frustration, death, despair, despair, despair! Be a man! Kill yourself!

Become as children! I have in mind the illuminating age of three to five, where the world bursts with mystery, where all things resonate with exuberance and newness, where life itself is almost exhausted by the inexhaustible curiosity of the child and its careless extraction of all the goodness the world itself holds. At approximately seven the greatest tragedy unfolds itself in the very midst of the garden of Eden: hyper-selfconsciousness blooms on the scene, and the seedlings of the adult makes itself known. Aware of itself, the child loses itself in the infinite negation of negative inwardness. The realization is a conflagration of fear and anxiety, and anxiety, being based in possibility -- the possibility involved with freedom -- proves that the grand gift of freedom necessarily has a tormenting birth. Nonetheless anxiety has a basis: future action; the torment of what you could be called to do for any situation. The sting of anxiety is the realization that anything at all could happen. Fear, healthy in itself (that intuitive instinct that serves in the bloodstream of the prudent like a light unto their feet), becomes intensified through anxiety: one fears not a particular object, a stimulus, but the possibility of an object, a stimulus, as yet unknown. Only until this child, now clothed in the destitution of its own overflowing self-consciousness, gains salvation -- relatively or absolutely, that is, religiously -- does this disease continue to thrive. Salvation -- that is, willing the singular, the good. "Purity of heart is to will one thing," free-floated the words of of that dexterous-minded Dane, Kierkegaard. Salvation is the commitment to this singularity, and more: the attachment of oneself to it as the greatest hope for oneself. The heavenly hope, born not of this world, based not on necessity and contingency -- the methods that this world espouses --, but between man and God, particular for each and every man, found in the Eternal consciousness of man, the revelation of this command, this law (as Emerson called it), and the continual existential recollection of it -- that is the quintessential cure for superfluous anxiety (and not all anxiety is superfluous), the beast whose fuel is a concern for the world around it, and a holding of value in something that can be lost in it, be it something physical, material, or more abstract, such as money, or, perhaps the most popular of all: reputation. Reputation is an implicit deal with appearance, and appearance is the meat that the world feeds on. But the child! He knows no value in money, least of all reputation! He has no value for looking good, fitting in, conformity. Its own body is valuable insofar as the immediacy of negative stimuli are concerned -- keep away from what hurts. If the world would only keep to this, the rest of life would come breaking towards it with such enthusiasm that strength would be born simply in pushing against this glorious tide.

More: the child knows how to hold on to each moment, consume its experiences, digest them, let them go, and move on. It holds no grudges, do not transfer whatever fears you experience into memory, thus translating them to, again, anxiety. The world is blown away in the unbroken cycle of anxiety: that great precendent to incredible choices has swallowed the weaker constitutions of the world -- and how many there are! -- thus the primary secular salvation is found in formulating methods by which to escape from it! But children! They experience it in its appropriate context and are not clogged with the unending pessimism involved with looking ahead to anxious situations -- thus creating anxiety at that moment! Their anxiety has a season.

What else? Trust. Trust implies a half-consciousness of that which provides in the mode of the provider. The babe that trusts its father is less aware of the father as a provider than as a father himself. Trust is always inferior to the stream of love, for it is born of love. It also entails a continual choice in relation to the one trusted, thus making the antithesis to trust (sin) possible. Children also make choices, and what paragonal choice-makers they are! What shame they put adults to, these anxious prattlers, despairing shadow-selves, quick to hit any form of insulation to save them from actualizing themselves in this world. Children know their contexts; they accept their misakes, their rebellions, their excellencies, and, once again, move on. They hold true a parental version of Luther's oft-misunderstood statement: love God and sin boldly! For the child: love those you have trust in, and break from this trust boldly! Their audacity is the only thing that makes them capable of being punished sufficiently, thus refined sufficiently. Even adults have no power to authentically, defiantly sin against those in whom they place their trust, God or man. Caught up in the stop of resentment and the envy and cowardice inherent to it, they speak in whispers, behind the backs of those perceived as culprits, and never learn to forget what has been done to them. Unlike children! Do children even have a concept of resentment? A boy is more likely to punch another boy in the arm than hold ill-defined feelings for him past his bed-time -- feelings that would only swarm until resentment is full-blown. Child, you have sinned boldly, and now you can taste the purifying though bitter waters of punishment, and learn to purge the devils that chase you. An adult -- ah, he doesn't even have devils; like his very self, he drags with him demon shades, whose voices speak as softly as he does. He can find no momentary superficial freedom in going through with these thin little demons, but instead: the everlasting hell of contempt that has no legs to stand for itself and finish the situation now fulminating in the bedraggled walls of his mind. That is the hell of resentment.

Trust, that is: let go of the world, for you believe that someone else holds it for you. The state of affairs is such that even if one confesses himself to be a Christian there is no palpable conviction of a divine providence watching over the world. Christians push it off to the after-life, where punishments will be handled so-called accordingly, meanwhile anyone with a dying voice of justice breaks through a rainbow of colors on his countenance in view of the injustices that clutter the world today. What does a child do? He may be exasperated at his seen unfairness, but if he is in the right company, he looks to his father, and even if the father apparently does nothing the child still has comfort in the perceived power of the father to keep things in line so that child -- doesn't have to. For power is implied in repose just as much as it is in actualizing itself. A king has power without commanding a single subject, just as much as the king who moves armies to conquer.

How insightful it was for that neglected existential-psychoanalyst Leslie Farber to speak of the loss in the belief in a divine will that keeps this world in sufficient condition for those who believe in Him, and how the prevalent loss of belief in this will can result only in neurosis. This relates directly to trust; faith is trust. To have faith in God is to trust Him, and without the feeling of an overseeing will that relates to the world and holds it together, the self will naturally strive to hold it together himself. Pure, concentrated madness. And this is where the person who follows through with this mode ends up -- in insanity. Think of the obsessive compulsive personalities. What is their psychosis based in? Bad neuro-transmitters? Well, yes, to a degree. But ideologically understood, the problem is based in -- a loss of trust: trust that the world will be alright without the assertion of one's will to make it alright. "Alright" here is meiotic for perfection, and perfection, it must be noted, is a relative state: bestness per moment, if you like. The fulfillment of potentialities; the greatest an entity or subject can be at any particular moment (thus the statement in the bible becomes possible, but horrifying: "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." -- Matthew 5:48). The person struck with OCD has no concept of perfection in this sense; perfection for him or her is an absolute goal, an impossible, unreachable, goal, not a higher dimension within time towards another (continually shifting) goal. The Christian goal is to will the good, and in willing it salvation (or living in truth) is the continual reward. When one mis-acts and fails (or better, refuses) to will the good, another chance is there in the next moment (repentence is the return to this wholeness through correct willing). That is ideally what is needed.

The child -- ah, endless fount of wisdom -- knows how to take the world unseriously, and in taking the world unseriously, it can take its own fun seriously. "A man's maturity," says Nietzsche, "consists in having found again the seriousness one has as a child, at play." Seriousness toward the world stems from a desire to gain something from it. Men go as far as to manipulate the world, and the people in it (thus dehumanizing them), in order to get what they want, and this oftentimes means getting the attention, the pure perception, the love, of others. And for a while they may have what they want, but always, always actuality falls short of the demand, the desire. Resignation is needed. Ah, resignation -- truly the hardest act a person can muster. Few do. It means an act of conscious forgetting, of throwing away for the fulfillment of the paradoxical demand of happiness: give that you might gain. It means supressing that which is bringing you down, freezing your consciousness on a single past even or idea or person -- letting them go. Children -- they have no need for resignation. They have no need to get ahead in the world, and forgetting comes naturally for them. Each problem dissolves with the hours that succeed them. The goal of resignation should be a conditioned capacity to forget easier. The child is here our master.

Thus it is: to be a Christian is to be as a child; not childish, but child-like. To be child-like is to essentially move on, digest one's experiences, greet the day and the stuttering souls within it without predispositions, without the paltriness of intersubjective quibbles, and thereby learn to love whatever one finds himself in front of. Aha, you may be thinking, children are not as ideal as you present them: they are selfish, complaining, starving for attention. Yes, but children know how to sin; the depravity of humanity magnified as it is in the adult reveals that not only has he no grasp of righteousness, no continuity in doing good, but also that he is clueless as to how to even properly sin, and that is: in the moment, and leave it behind. The child, as a paradigm for a spiritual state, would be a terrible paradigm if it had little to no relation to man's potentialities, to his dark sides, to sin when it presents itself. Blessed are you child, for you, like nature, are everywhere, and yet we have no yees to see the wisdom you have for us each and every day.

We are called to become as children! There is no greater sanctuary for paradox than Christianity. And there is no greater sanctuary for awe than paradox.

Ode to a Maybe-Wife

The girl looks out with a shadowed smile,
Black eyes to match the blackest moods
That fly away from each and every soul
At the moment their eyes embrace her own.
Strange girl, made from ideas and joy,
Whose presence recollects you to the sun.

Ah, and add to this I've never met her.
And suddenly the art of dancing
Finds my self now willing to explore,
With gleaming eyes and nerve-less arms,
With all the beauty of the world,
Including her.

Contrast is Everything

There was a young man I knew, before my life had the color it has now: he was what one might call a madman, the strange thing being that features gave the appearance of the everyday: clean-shaven, healthy skin, piercing blue eyes; but his smile –- ah, his smile was sheer savagery, and I was among his victims.

His apparent task in life was to run across anyone he found while telling them, with an apocalyptic insanity, lips doused with an almost hyperkinetic blur, “contrast is everything!” incessantly, as if his single mission in life was to drive to the ground anyone he saw with these same stubborn words –- never a change, never a break, always the same; we were flogged with it. He would wander the streets, systematically, over and over, like an echo granted flesh, seeking people he had seen the day before, his insistence carrying the shadow of a stalker, and never without –- mark this –- his beloved saxophone –- a tenor saxophone: a worn-down, neglected, ragamuffin instrument, without a single patch of sheen, littered with rust, long since dropped by the warm hands of beauty. You would never see him without it.

Our group was composed of five or six. We met on a somewhat-grassy portion of land, a sort of meeting-ground between our respective apartments, amidst other groups: men without need to mention, who preferred their covert identities. We were nothing more than common men striving towards the medians or our lives; we knew what it was to settle down; we knew, yes, mediocrity; we knew the same. All we wanted in life was to enjoy the dying day under the blushing rays of the sun at the last patch of land this enormous city seemed close to stealing from us. But him – he would walk up to our group at approximately six o’clock every single day for over a week, cut in his worn-out maxim during our conversations, and always –- always! –- paint his same tiring phrase with a horrendous attempt at improvisation on that fucking little saxophone. The noise was always enough to unravel my nerves, freeze my frame with contempt. My response was always an endless flinch. Imagine a duck on a loquacious drinking-binge. You have it.

And the scene never changed: after playing a few pseudo-notes in various places, the walls bleeding in pain, the very oxygen of the place on the verge of splitting town, the whole performance each time lasting no more than two minutes, he would break out with “contrast is everything!” spoken with what seemed like such a careless seriousness, almost as if he was mocking us for being ignorant of this strange idea he preached. Again, again, again, inexorably – a tenth ring for Dante were eternity ever added –- “contrast is everything! Contrast is everything! Everything!” He abused his instrument; he abused us. A sparkling smartass in our clique joked how both he and the saxophone needed a hundred hours of psychotherapy. God knows we tried to put up with him; and God knows we lost.

Patience was worn. One day he walked up to our particular group –- I’m sure he planned this –- and pulled out the same farce as before. Bad notes, bad notes, “contrast is everything!” bad notes, bad notes, an nausea-inspiring run down a chromatic scale, and, always: “contrast is everything!”. The crowd, our group included, was by now ready to lynch him. A man whose sufferings gave the appearance of an older age than he actually was, whose face some said was worn with unnamable suffering, broke out in a not-quite-trot, stopping three feet before him, screaming the words “goddamnit man! What the hell are you talking about?” staring down the madman-saxophonist with eyes gasping for understanding. The he was me.

The savage was unswayable: he made a break for a little free safety by walking a few feet away, and while he was escaping, he continued this ridiculous absurdity. Ruffling my hair in despair, oscillating looks between him and the other men there, I wanted to tear him to pieces. I felt myself magnetized towards him; clawing involuntary in his direction, he flew away: he leaped onto some unimportant steps, and with his new altitude, broke into the strangest repose. For five seconds he stared us down, smiled, closed his eyes (which he had never done before), and placed his lips again to the mouthpiece. I flinched in advance.

Superfluously. Starting on a high voluptuous D, he slipped his way down his own little scale with a deftness and seduction that I had never heard before, tone tapering with an immaculate vibrato, and more, more, more. The emanations that flowed from that bedraggled instrument I could not believe I was hearing. Coltrane had no touch on him. It was the most remarkable piece of music I had ever heard, and played with such passion! It pierced my heart, and left me in a convulsion of shivers, a jangling mass of nerves. The feeling wasn’t that different from falling in love, and exactly like it I had to catch my breath again.

Gazing at him, my shock freely showing, I finally looked back at the rest of my group: everyone else was the same; a few people one could easily assume were dead –- the animation was so long forgotten in their transfixed eyes. One man had this moment forever symbolized by the burn-hole in his spotted gray shirt, the helpless culprit the equally shocked cigarette that dropped from his gape-jawed mouth and burned until he burned. It was as if some strange and fantastic deity was translated into music, and each man here applauded with his own unique silence, his own astonished face.

After he finished this solo, so caught up in himself in performing it, he opened his eyes to the crowd now ready to adore him –- this crowd, just now planning a murder; this crowd, led by my very self in leading him to the gallows -–, and, with the strangest look, something of a mixture of gentleness and mischievousness, his eyes glowing lampposts that penetrated the fog of our incredulity, he said in a half-whisper, half-reproach, half-warning, like the noble Christ resting his Beatitudes on the consenting crowd below him:

“Contrast is everything.” He walked from the place with a look of satisfaction, a sort of affectionate laughter in his eyes, leaving footsteps of eternity in his place, and passed right by me, just after softly grazing his burning fingers to my shivering elbow, a frozen mystique sweet-set in his radiant blue eyes. Beauty like that deserves laughter, and laugh I did. I laughed until my eyes leaked. That day his madness became mine.

And we never saw him again. He apparently knew his own gospel.

Lost Inwardness

Inwardness is losing. We live in a society of cell phones, cameras, the incessant superficial poser anxiety. With the loss of inwardness comes an inverse growth of externality. With externality comes massification. With massification the self no longer is itself; the "I" is lost to the intoxicating "we". Ontology becomes mixed in with the path of least resistance; this means transparency, superficiality. The doors of desire are opened, and the pathway of addiction is walked. It would be better to say that addiction does the walking.

Desire amputates existence. It keeps a man alive -- with no freedom to question why he is alive, an existence for the sake of fulfilling. This is false meaning, or, more appropiately, pre-meaning. Desire is bestial; consequently is means the fragmentation and dissipation of consciousness. Only when the desire is transiently fulfilled or frustratingly abandoned does a man have the possibility to question himself and his world -- both of which are inextricably linked. But this is becoming harder and harder with the progress of civilization and its continually new clever ways at providing the means to the fulfillment of these desires. Desire is a stomach. It stretches imperceptibly with each moment of oversatiation. And stimulation is so expedient, so simple, so overflowing, a possibility at every thoughtless angle, that it is capable of murdering the soul, shutting it up, leaving the world of the sensate in domination. The self is a relation between two terms, two polarities. With the amplification of one comes the negation of the other. A moment of pure sensation, pure stimulation, is the death of the soul; the relation is lost, lopsided, and this results in the death of the self. In a moment of pure contemplation, the body (outside of neurological processes) has died; the relation is lost, lopsided, and this results in the death of the self. Consciousness is the relation, and insofar as one is conscious, he is at least minimally "alive". Walker Percy likened our selves to a percentage: the average self, he said, is about two percent. Thus the common man is perpetually on the edge of oblivion, existential nothingness, death, death, death.

Desire makes the other opaque. He is no longer a You realized through relation, translucent in being. Even sub-relationally, the recognition of his body, her smile, her laughter, her fingers fail to signify immediately a subject, a relation potentiality. This is because desire instrumentalizes for the sake of its own fulfillment. A You instrumentalized fails to be a You, and becomes instead an It. With the loss of the You, Buber notes, comes the loss of spirit. "Spirit in its human manifestation is man's response to his You." This response is made freely; it literally defines man through the freedom he presents as a response. Whether God or mankind (a tautological statement), existence as becoming-towards, as striving, as freedom (all of which are synonyms for spirit), is possible only through relation. With the loss of relation through the reduction to and particularization of the Other, the I, which otherwise has authentic being only in relation to a You, becomes a ghost, a misconception, an existential misnomer. A critique of Descartes.

The past age was one of constipated meditation. No action. Today hardly anyone thinks with a depth enough to deserve the title of meditation, yet activity inwardly qualified is a ghost, a nonentity, a fiction, just as much as it was in the past age where thought was almost an excuse for movement. Thought and authentic action are both erased from culture. What is left? Sensationalism, sentimentality, intoxication. In short, the senses. In short, a return to Greece. But at least the Greeks knew how to think. A child is born into this world, discovers his surroundings tactilely, visually, yes, gustatorily (and maybe the carpet does taste better than we think). He learns to crawl, then learns to walk. This inclination and dedication to movement is a parable for mankind. Spiritually understood -- inwardly understood -- most men have only crawled through life, with the smallest possible amount of self-assertion. Few have actually stood on their own legs and taken a few steps. Only the saints have walked. Which isn't to say that the crawling man doesn't have spark-moments wherein he proves himself to be a saint -- but again goes back to crawling. The same is true for those who don't know how to crawl.

Inwardness is losing, and true movement is possible only by surpassing the threshold of externality and joining with inwardness. Nietzsche hypothesized a necessary return to man's prelinguistic state, where consciousness becomes a thin veneer, stretched over the controlling impulses that now constitute man's "lower" nature. Brutal, if you will. But Nietzsche, the incarnation of Dionysus he claimed himself to be, was opposed to drinking. He had profound moments of transcendence. He knew beauty, and knew the aesthetic "fight" for life entailed with this incendiary love for the sublime. But a thin veneer of consciousness has no place with a deep love for life. Feelings transcend, yes; but it's after the experience, when the self is left with the effulgent remainder of the experience that culminated in transcendence, when it returns again to itself in a deeper sense that it can truly appreciate what has happened. It is the feeling that follows transcendence that results in the positive feeling of this transcendence, and without a relative depth of, by no means a hyper-selfconsciousness (this often is painful), there is a smaller appreciation entirely. The hidden law of existence comes to mind: contrast is everything.

Poetic

"What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music." -- Kierkegaard

The great thing about being poetic is that when you get sad over losing your poetic vein, you have it all over again. Analogously, the closer to suicide you are, the greater a writer you are. Hemingway's greatest creation was the one he was working on -- when he shot himself. The trick of writing is to quarantine negative memories, steal the fire, synthesize them with the magic of creativity, birth a wonder in words, and let the memories flow back into the unconscious rivers of the mind. Yes, it's a skill that takes time to master. But to choose the power to create luminously over living -- that is the mindset of a person whose children I weep for.

Dylan Said: "I'm Sick of Love"

The sadness of love sickness is unlike other forms of sadness. These other forms, based in other causes, are always too mundane, too banal, to be worthy of the sadness of love, for this sadness is caused by the particularly of a person -- who cannot be replicated precisely because she cannot be generalized.

"I'm down, down, down. This whole world seems against me. I lost my job, wrecked my car, my dog died, I'm unattractive, obese, stupid, unoriginal, with no talents."
"Please. If you only knew the sadness I feel. Because of X! Ah! The endless ways to think of her!"

Which accounts for why love sickness is the most preferred of all forms of sadness; which also accounts for perhaps the leading cause for suicide. The coils will not be shaken off -- the cause seems heroic, noble, archetypal, and is fought precisely for the different characteristics that constitute this counter self. If the person is warm and endearing, the sorrow is for that; humorous and forgiving for that too; beautiful -- why, for that, oh, celestial wonder of this infinite cosmos, if only for that! And the latter cannot be escaped; the person is inexorably beautiful, just as beauty is inexorably attractive. The emotional release -- the pheromones, the endorphins, and other narcotics of the brain -- sets in place the gravity of focus, and, depending on the broadness of the luminous qualities of the person in consideration, this focus will either work within reason, or insanely hard to find at least a single quality that can be held in esteem -- and run it into the ground. The person is creative and charming and funny and poetic. This isn't to say that the emotional release predestines our perception of the other, though typically this is the case. These two attractive adolescents love because they are both -- attractive. Their positive qualities hold only black holes in their personalities. They reason out the angles of each other and conclude, with consciences pinpricked, that all is glory, wonder, beauty. They attempt a relationship -- and grow in emotional maturity. Their failure is obvious to the non-intoxicated: they have no matching characteristics with which to hold each other up. This is the spiritual test of love: to seek an obective set of matches in another while being gloriously suffocated with a torrent of glittering emotions, and if this cannot be done, suffer for the sake of future happiness by cooling the heat of passion and dropping it when it is closest to hypnosis.

Interestingly, whether one quality or ten doesn't matter; and some qualities can be created ex nihilo and still be worshipped as evidences of perfection. It's as if the mind, seeking a reasonable explanation for why a person is attracted to someone with no intrinsically good qualities, creates its own fantasies to satisfy the demands of reason, and reason, so transfixed by the magic of the imagination, resigns to the predisposed desires of the self. Thus the blindness of love, created by the emotional release. Thus the "falling" into love; the emotional swirl is a torrent of euphoria, a thunderstorm. Love is almost a vice of the unconscious inflicted on the person who is inebriated with it: it rises out of involuntary feelings, these feelings based in emotions, these emotions based (in part) in lower chemical neurological reactions. It rises out, and strangles the person "in" it, whether blessedly or as a curse, depending, of course, on the person's capacity to follow through with what love has fulminated in his being, unasked, but always subsequently preferred. If the person cannot follow through, his desire is broken off. Consequently he is tormented, and his love will, once again, abdicate reason through the possibility of imagination. He will be deluded into waiting -- until she is available, until she returns, until she consents; it doesn't matter. This period of waiting will bring before him the continual possibility of just breaking it off and getting on with his life; but this takes incredible spirit; often he will simply wait until his passion cools. The hardness of the way is what it is because, as alluded to previously, he thinks he is fighting for something scintillatingly particular, unreplicable, a portion of the universe with no equal -- and it has no equal; no self, no matter how superficial or nearing-nonexistence, is equivalent to the next (even though, spiritually considered, one has to look closer for differences the less of a self the self itself is in relation to the other). He is fighting for her beauty -- nothing compares! Her smile -- nothing compares! And, yes, dear reader, nothing compares! Glory to God! Mankind is a treasure! But skip ahead and imagine one year from now when he no longer desires her. He will say to himself, "yes, I was in love with her once. She was beautiful; she still is beautiful. Her depth was endless; her depth is still endless. Her smile is immaculate; why, her smile still is what it was. Why, then, did I ever torment myself over the fantastic chance that she would be mine then when I feel nothing now?" The answer is: the emotional playingfield. He could not break from the drug because he confused the drug with her. After all, attraction is not tantmount to the thing attractive. Hm. But to realistically think a person could think that, through cold, detached reasoning, in the moment of erotic ecstasy -- ludicrous! But, ah, yes, yes, glory to God again! He still has the impulse of the Eternal within him; the timeless signpost stamped on the walls of his soul, conscious of it each moment he is conscious of himself. The Eternal commands: move on. It does not reason; reason only invites doubt, and doubt is a stronger tide than certainty. It only stands, immutable, with the same advice: move on! Yes, move on; make the leap and get on with your life. God will provide. Enough of this futile ruination of a good soul! Move on, and in moving, yes, you will suffer too, but the darkness of your suffering will contain with it a light of hope, and with each step its rays will warm the skin of your happiness until it once again penetrates your whole being, and there you will stand, a stronger man because of the sufferings you overcame. Not the sufferings of despair, that always bear no fruit. The sufferings of righteousness; of responding in faith to the Eternal within you! Lovers of the world! I say, continue to love! But when your love wraps itself around you tighter than loving hands should and proceeds to constrict the very blood within you, simply resign it, and all will be well.

But how hard, how infinitely hard even this leap is! Broad is the way to destruction. Yes. Few find life; that is, few will the strength to live it. To suffer for love! What else is there to suffer for! But this suffering murders the one caught in it; thus it potentially murders, or at least mutilates, the relations the one has. This is worth fighting for? No, the higher love is worth fighting for, for in fighting for it there is none of the inner turmoil of erotic love; in fighting for it the inwardness of man is revitalized as he fights for it, and in fighting for it, he fights for the good of the whole world. This is the love worth fighing for!

But erotic love has brought so much as well. It is responsible for almost all of the beauty in the history of the world, whether as an immediate cause, or a cause proper. Its frustration is sublimated into creativity, whether explicitly with the beloved in mind, as the subject, or not, where the power of the love fuels the creative flow, undifferentiated (Freud was three-fourths wrong: love moreso than sexual desire as a motivation for creativity; at times sex predicated by love; rarely sex without love). Without love, more, we would not be capable of perceiving beauty. It is really love that opens the doors of perception; it signals the beautiful patches of the ontology of the beloved, and for once we see something for its own sake -- and with each taste we form an idea, a preference, for the beauty of the world. Consequently we desire to see it as often as we can. And eventually perhaps we choose God, for He is the keymaster to the floodgates of the beautiful.

Ramblings

Imagine where I am sitting. The room is clothed in a not-quite-victorious darkness, two lights breaking its intent at opposite corners of both of my eyes. Sound is on exile; beauty now has the throne it once possessed. Each breath is a meditation. The atmosphere insulates, commiserates. I am stretched out on his lovely couch. Absolutely nothing is wrong with the world. The aesthetic has disappeared, evaporated into the cloud of my freedom. The cloud is flavored with it, colored with it; everything is beautiful precisely because I will only what I can will. My existence is beautiful; that is, it has its telos in itself. And somehow, in the margin of typing these words, within the five minutes of contemplative slow-steps involved in actualizing my intention through the assertion of my will -- I am happy. I was unhappy. I was waiting for happiness, constricted by the inertia of the aesthetic.

Inertia applies to the aesthetic. It must, or else transcending it requires no exertion; transcending it means asserting freedom; freedom means the crucifixion of our adaptation. One would otherwise stumbles into happiness, just as easily as happiness stumbles upon the aesthete. The sting of the aesthetic is, of course, beauty; that is the dream of living without movement. What good is beauty? It is a nudge to exist. But as an overdose it is like a water chamber: man is drenched in it, engulfed at all sides, suffocated, each moment a superlative in pain, and he can do nothing at all but take it and wait for an end. Why? Beauty invites desire, and desire stretches.

Here: this happiness is beginning to drain -- and as I am writing, asserting my self, it is draining no more. I was beginning to doubt; added to this doubt: worry. I was thinking, ten seconds ago: my writing is false, pedestrian, artificial, naked of metaphor creativity, terse, Hemingwayesque, flaccid, boring, revolting. These doubts were freezing waters that contaminated my being, lethargized it, froze it. The more one doubts his own center, the more he is lost in his own periphery; to be aesthetic is to have one's periphery as one's center. The periphery is the world, and the self is meant to act upon it; the aesthete has the world as his self, which is to say: his self doesn't exist.

I was out tonight, haunting the streets with a trivial end in mind. I am in the center lane, the right-of-way is mine; green arrow, left. In turning another car cuts me off. Female, collegiate. Just as I trail behind her, just as she turning before me, her face turns to mine; her eyes evidently facing mine, but in moving so quickly I cannot discern her mood. I look to find a parking space, and make my way out. She has circled around, and again I catch her but -- ah, the look is concentrated clarity: a subtle contempt, unasked for, undeserved, her eyebrows contract with an infinitesimal fleeting movement; I walk on, emitting a mechanical spark-sigh, and suddenly I am alienated from the world of humanity.

Human beings are little transcendences. Apperitifs. They signify possibilties. To play this game, to wager one's happiness on the other, is to be for others. These days virtually all is being-for-others. Corollary: all is appearance. To attempt to exist for the sake of something else is not to exist, but to act, and no man can contravene his own script without his conscience stinging him; no man can escape his self, though he can work at forgetting, and forgetting is the cleverest invention of cheap happiness. All cheap happiness is myopic; it has the childish conjuration that each moment exists without relation to others. What is the greatest machine for forgetting? Alcohol.

If all is appearance, nothing is appreciated for being what it is. It isn't absurd to conceive of a woman who dates a man to prove a point. Her "lover" is a means to an end: the attention of others, the gradual climb up the ladder of admitted existence, whose rungs flutter ahead like a ten mile train that bends out of sight. In a world where nothing is appreciated intrinsically, everything is means -- for something else, which means that nothing in the world is an end, save the fleeting and arbitrary attention from others: a ghost whose essence is possibility. Today one only wishes the historical claims of the poets were true: that love hurts, love is pain, for at least here love exists, at least here instrumentality isn't all, for instrumentality is all when nothing is valued intrinsically. The eternal qualities are leaking from man; all that will remain is the eternal vice: existential hand-waving whose meaning is hollow, a massive sign, penetrating the universe of society, that signifies nothing.

What is the cure?

On the Common Christian

The common Christian is an individual who is always right, regardless of his layman subjectivity.

Whose callous wrath is more aptly self-termed "righteous anger".

Who creates God in his image via his inexorable interpretation and declares this the objectivity of scripture, while neurotically holding a warning over those who do not, regardless of the glaring existence of a world of denominations.

Is a sinner who demands repentance, but rejects the claims of sinlessness as the logical progression of sincere repentance; i.e., takes pleasure in the concept of a God who takes pleasure in the concept of sending convicts to heaven.

Demands the despotic errancy of the intellect over the application of the heart in seeking and expressing the good.

Is apt to project what he is impulsively repulsed by as irrevocably bad, regardless of what cold reason declares as otherwise possible; see homosexuality, women's rights, etc.

Cannot fathom quantam physics, but CAN fathom Norman Geisler's unfathomed "justifiable" crtique and rejection of it as "proof" of the blasphemy of honest science and metaphysics.

Loves his fellow man...only in reaction to the dreadful "all-seeing eye" (God).

Empties primarily the terms "God" and "Jesus" of all semantic value through incessant repetition, thoughtless repetition, leaving them in the ditch of sentimentality, irrationality, absurdity.

Has no concept of the ideas of awareness, detachment, or meditation, and considers any form of edification outside of their own whitewashed Christendom precisely not edification, but something accursed by God.

Is incapable of commiseration, relatedness, or happiness towards those who are not of "the one, true faith"; relates to others only as a condescending, dehumanizing means of converting them.

Is on a perpetual quest to lower others to their own unhappiness, concealed under the facade of happiness, so absurdly titled "salvation".

Considers the works of Siddharta, Gandhi, Maimanodes, and other non-Christian luminaries expressions of evil, or at the very least falseness, while John Calvin, Martin Luther, and other aaronsic characters are quite the memorable saints.

Reduces God to a concept -- a concept to be feared nevertheless, like the boogyman --, to be revealed as something grand "when we all get to heaven", while spiritual life is a fearful atophied existence here and now.

Neither lives for today, nor tomorrow, but demands that the world does not, cannot, and will find its only living precisely where there is no life: namely, with the the very ones who cannot live.

Christ is a hero, not a savior; is feared, not loved; is fought over, but never lovingly embraced.

God creates only to condemn, and punishes because He is "just", because men are "sinful" and unworthy of love, and such "justice" demands dogmatic adherance to various divine decrees, for no other reason than to escape divine contempt, not for the goodness of His creatures.

Hates the mystic because he is too mystical; hates the rationalist because he "intellectualizes" religion; hates the hated, and hates their attempts at liberation from such hatred.

Despise critiques of their own selfishness, but are so very capable of critiquing the world around them.

Are summed up with these words from Walker Percy: "They, too, are a curious, inquisitive, murderous civilization.... They are sentimental, easily moved to tears, and kill each other with equal ease. Uncognitive of their predicament and pre-help. Paranoid mind-set. Two superpowers, ideological combat but not yet a nuclear exchange. They like wars too, pretend not to, but get in trouble during an overly prolonged peace. Right now they are bored to death and spoiling for a fight."

In short, are not Christians, but proclaim Christianity; are not religious, but claim to be religious, while despising good religion; are not good, but parasitic on all things good; they are, as Nietzsche said, responsible for the conception of the world as evil and bad and little more -- a world as a consequence without a tinge of wonder, beauty, or benevolence.

Even shorter: they are the weak of the earth, in denial of their weakeness, hating the world for its limited freedom from weakness.

But there are some who actually follow Christ.

Inclusivism

No, I'm not a pluralist. The idea is salvation: does one need to hear Christ proclaimed in order for it to exist? Surely this wasn't the case in the Old Testament. Melchezedec was an OT pagan deemed righteous (therefore holding "correct" faith -- Romans 1:17) before meeting Abraham. Job comes to mind. Abel, Enoch, Noah, Daniel -- they all add to the mix as well. All of these are individuals either before Abraham or pagans after Abraham who were considered righteous by God -- justified by faith without the revelation of Judaism or Christ.

There's a danger to conventional theology. If salvation is consummated explicitly through external means -- i.e., hearing about Christ, accepting Him, etc. -- and individuals from other religions clearly show the fruits of the spirit (gentleness, kindness, etc.) but haven't heard of Christ through external means or accepted Him through such are not saved, and the revelation of these fruits in no way necessarily indicates that salvation has taken place, we run into an epistemic difficulty: how does one know that he has really heard Christ proclaimed? Maybe the objective gospel contains an infinitesimally different Jesus than the gospels we've heard, and infinitesimal or infinite one is still in error because conception doesn't line up with the "real", objective gospel. That is to say, if salvation means hearing about Jesus and accepting a particular "version" of Him (namely, the "biblical" one), and "fruits" signify nothing, even if an individual from another religion clearly shows stronger virtues than so-called "saved" Christians, we have a problem of certainty.

Add to this the preternatural absurdity of what I call the theory of the Divine Transaction: that salvation, because it is centered externally, is a business transaction between the saved and the savior. The moment someone "confesses" that Christ existed, rose from the dead, and such and so on, God writes this down in His big divine business book, and salvation is precisely acknowledgement of this deed. Human beings are essentially rather expensive cars, promised some nice racing-ground in a future life, while being destined to a spiritual garage in this one; and every deal is a scandal by virtue of the ludicrous requirements: being born in the right time, at the right place (where the gospel is preached), and believing the right things. Positive change in character is secondary to "right belief". This theory, as prevalent as American Idol, makes way for what Bonhoeffer called cheap grace: the cognitive-assertive, at times sentimental, superficial faith without sanctification, without a necessary transformation of the character of the one saved.

In addition to the problem of salvation as an external deal, we have the problem of the misconception of salvation as quantiative. Salvation, etymologically meaning “wholeness” or “healing”, is biblically elucidated by Christ as precisely a qualitative relationship rather than a quantitative one:

"This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent." -- John 17:3 (NASB)

That is to say, salvation is essentially relational, and relatedness implies the ontological present. Moreover, any conception of salvation as the prolongation of the righteous soul to eternity is absurd because it is (according to the quantiative model) redundant: the wicked are also said to live forever. If this is the case, there is no semantic value to the phrase "salvation", seeing how the condemned undergo the exact same thing. Salvation must undergo the paradigm shift and be replaced with an immanent, present-centered, qualitative ideal.

Getting back, we need to define salvation as an internal process, at least intrinsically. Fruits need to count as they were meant to count: symptoms of inner goodness, not juxtapositions or coincidences. Here we come to the mystic idea of the "inner light", or even, at a stretch, approximations to Hinduism and concepts of Atman -- salvation is the "really real" part of the soul that transcends phenomenal reality. A good doctrine that fits with this -- as well as the general Old Testament idea of salvation prior to Christ -- is Logos Christology. According to this, Christ is the Logos, or living word of God, mentioned fleetingly at the beginning of the gospel of John. This Logos is the essence of salvation, and being internally founded (John 1:4), it is universally accessible without explicit external means to finding it. All men have it; it's fused with the soul.

What is the essence of this Logos, this Word? Exactly what it says it is: an eternal Word. Consciousness, after all, is constituted in the fusing of signifier with signified -- with the "thing" and the title of the "thing". When a person attempts to express something, he may speak a word. This word in itself does nothing (think of how semantically useless foreign languages are to you if you can't speak them: because you have no idea what the words "mean", they remain words, and nothing more); it is what it signifies that is important. So it goes from a trinitarian perspective: God the Father "speaks" a particular Word to every man, and this Word (this Logos) is literally the Son of God Himself (that is: Christ stripped of the historical qualifications of Christ: the Son of God) stamped in the consciousness of each individual. Kierkegaard called it "the Eternal" -- the trans-temporal ideological fusion constituting man's higher self -- this higher self that allows the real self to actualize through freely choosing it, ideally on a continual basis. The person who chooses to continually fulfill this Logos-commandment, particular for each person, is within salvation: his being is pure, undivided; contrariwise, the person who refuses to fulfill this Logos-commandment is outside of salvation. More:

Faith means the voluntary existential consummation of this Logos-commandment. Voluntary because nobody can do it for you; existential because it involves your existence, your self. This particular Logos-commdandment, this ideal, defines man's spiritual hope. Whereas in an earthly sense hope means placing a wager on something external, spiritual hope means the Logos-commandment for each individual self. Sin is understood as whatever lies outside of faith (Romans 14:23), or the refusal to do what one knows to be right (James 4:17); it is antithetical to faith, and just as the righteous live by faith (Hab 2:4; Romans 1:17), the sinful man lives against it -- that is, in sin. Sin, thus, means a working against the Logos-commandment found within you, and by so doing this and contravening your true spiritual hope, sin is thus despair. To sin is to kiss off your authentic hope. It might be a bit of a stretch, but I see no other place for our salvation than the Logos itself.

Of course, the point of Christianity, theologically understood through the lens of this perspective, means directing every man to the pre-existing Logos within through the external preaching of Christ without. The "good news" that defines the Gospel is that there is a "wholeness" or "healing" (literally the etymological meaning of salvation) present at hand -- through the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is at hand -- that is, within reach. It needs nothing external for it to exist, for "the kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:21). Nevertheless there still is a gospel that exists through external means: through the preaching of what universal human existence contains within it (i.e., the Kingdom of God, and as a corollary, salvation), human being can take advantage of what is within them. Salvation is more like a kernel found within each man -- a kernel of particularity by virtue of being his own particular Logos-commandment, different in relation to the man next to him; a kernel that must be actualized through freedom; a kernel that, first of all, needs to be realized for what it is. After all, if the kingdom is based within and man is ignorant of it, he must discover it; it is a hidden treasure, right before our noses, "a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys the field" (Matthew 13:44).

Nonetheless, the point is: if "salvation" is a universal kernel, and fruits reveal the inner goodness of a person -- his relative climb up the varying (or not?) gradations of salvation --, is it not possible that a person can be saved without hearing of Christ?

Seeing how salvation through external means entails the problem of certainty regarding which "version" of Christ you hear being the "correct" one so as to make the divine transaction complete, we left with ascertaining on the basis of "fruits": "A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit" [Matthew 7:18]. And surely people from other religions -- even people not considered "religious" -- have clearly revealed their fruits to be positive. Well, then, are they saved?

It gets a little philosophical. Salvation, being wholeness or healing, can be seen as a completion and an end: one is technically saved when he is absolutely whole or healed, or on the way to getting there. Yes, salvation can take the form of becoming, of being-toward-wholeness or being-toward-healing. The important point is discerning what the telos (end) is that makes the process of becoming possible. And in the case of Christian inclusivism, it's Christ, in the form of the Logos.

Why this ends in inclusivism and not pluralism is that salvation ends in Christ; which is to say, it isn't that other religions are absolutely wrong, but that, at least metaphysically, they're not completely right. Pluralism can't work because it means a resignation of differing religious metaphysics by virtue of the law of non-contradiction: you can't have certain threads of Christian metaphysics with Hindu metaphysics (one believed in reincarnation, one didn't; so both must be thrown out to accomodate the homogenizing tendencies of pluralism); which essentially means the end of the specific religions themselves, seeing how the credibility of the savior figures of each particular religion are tied in with their metaphyics. Buddha, for instance, preached anatta, or "no self", whereas Christ preached the self to its very brim -- particularly the self's dedication to, and reformation through, relation to God. If a particular metaphysic is considered wrong in order to work with pluralism, that's implying the person who made such an emission has a break (minimal or major) to his credibility. Nonetheless, it seems the farther West you get the more specific your God-concepts are -- the less He becomes impersonal, the more He becomes personal, interventional, and so on. Eastern religions, from the perspective of Christian exclusivism, penetrate the periphery and are on their way to the center of objective theistic truth; special revelation, being a particular product of interventionalist religions (i.e., Christianity, Judaism), transcends the general revelation of other religions -- the revelation that comes through inherent wisdom, reasoning, and so on in terms of religious discovery. Of course, Islam, for instance, seems a twin of Christianity by virtue of its almost identity religious makeup (save such things as trinitarianism, for instance); obviously this creates a problem for Christian inclusivism.

But the reason a person would find completion in Christianity, rather than, say, Buddhism or Islam, is that Christianity has the most explicit, precise theological claims; and it is also (in the case of juxtaposing Christianity with Islam), the most practical. It fits the best and its metaphysics reach the deepest: not an impersonal deity, but a personal one; not pantheism, but (a subtle but important difference) panentheism; not salvific weight on the necessarily doubtful interpretive process of holy texts (as is the case with Islam), but interaction with a real, spiritually palpable living Word etched in the soul of humanity, the specific identity of which is revealed to be the Son of God, who walked this earth at a particular point in history.

Chinese Christians have Taoistic translations of the New Testament that fascinatingly hit on this idea: "In the beginning was the Tao, and the Tao was with God, and the Tao was God." -- Such runs the beginning of John according to such translations.

Presumably Christ the (God-)man is the historical qualification of the Logos -- it is technically not Christ involved in the process of salvation, but the Logos, the Son of God. When Christ refers to Himself in the gospels He is speaking of the spiritual essence, the true deity-aspect of the Godhead: his Logos-identity. And as such, considered in this light, especially considering how salvation in the Old Testament was possible through faith without hearing about Christ (and contrary to popular opinion, without placing primary weight on the law), the New Testament comes alive with a completely different way of looking at it. Every instance where salvation is mentioned in relation to Christ or the Son of God would relate to this Logos identity. To be saved is not to respond to the external Christ, but the internal Logos through the proclamation of the historical Christ. The external, historical Christ, is more like a diagnostician in pointing out the depravity of human nature. He points to salvation, which means sinlessness, which means doing what is right while rejecting what is wrong (James 4:17; Romans 14:23) -- both ideas intuitively grasped, sensible only if there is a pre-existing inner law that makes sin, and its opposite (faith), possible. He says, "live by faith, and sin no more," and in living by faith, we are living in Him; He is the historical mediator, and the ontological mediator: He has, through His teaching, diagnosed our spiritual problem; through his life, revealed what the ideal life should be like; and through his spiritual identity (Logos), given us a light through which righteousness through faith is possible.

This Logos, again, resides in all, whether muffled or not. The task of religion is to uncover this Logos; and because all authentic religions do this to a degree, they are all relatively valid; but because Christianity does it the best, it is the end of inclusivism. Nonetheless, other people from other religions have found it, oftentimes infinitely better than the so-called Christians who associate themselves with Christendom. Think of Siddhartha, of Gandhi, of Maimanodes, of Socrates. The list goes on and on.

"The acid test for any theology is this: Is the God presented one that can be loved, heart, soul, mind, and strength? If the thoughtful, honest answer is; "Not really," then we need to look elsewhere or deeper. It does not really matter how sophisticated intellectually or doctrinally our approach is. If it fails to set a lovable God - a radiant, happy, friendly, accessible, and totally competent being - before ordinary people, we have gone wrong." - Dallas Willard