The Scientist

Clothed in silent meekness,
Without an enemy in the world,
He stretches his feminine hand
To the infinitesimal specimen,
To fix the microscope,
To cover his mouth from a cough.
The air conditioner shuts its whir
With a catarrhal bang,
And he exhales a eulogy.

And outside the world beams
With warmth and brightness,
Which he never sees,
And his wife, lost in her delusion,
Still emanates a warmth
Which he can't quite understand.

And so he throws it all away
And dedicates the day
To study, study, study,
And a soul unrecognized
Dies just the same.

New Prayer

Lord, let me create. Let me be like you.

Oh Well

Hello everyone, I'm being murdered. Memories hold the rusty knife, and I can never bleed enough to die. Memories are s'posed to be friends, but I'm apparently playing Caesar, and there's one primal crownstealer, surnamed metaphysical Brutus, who leads the churchless charge. I also call him X, and X in a five year past, in a cluttered collection of memories whose each member brims with unutterable detail -- like a walk through paradise, like a first kiss on a beautified autumn night.

And I can never do enough to escape from it. The memory itself burns, but burns with an added pain: it symbolizes, with all the others, how much I squandered, how many chances I threw away, because -- I was a coward: hypersensitive, neurotically afraid, detailing each possibility and dispensing with each and every one. You're not getting any more detail than that.

And yet, there is nothing I can do to change the mistakes I've made, and more: there's nothing that indicates that they should be changed. I am in the right place -- but how the hell does that erase the past of my mistakes? My entire life could be different had I made a different choice those five years previous -- it would be right then, as it is painfully right now. I don't understand it, but I know it. I know it. Things are right. The external isn't the standard; the internal is. The external is a diversion.

What then? The external, the world out there, registered through sensation, is both everything and nothing -- all we have, and completely irrelevant. I can adore this lovely rose, this pristine collection of Eliotian poetry, only because it is valued -- clasped for -- as nothing; conversely, I can call something nothing if it is valued as something. If I clasp for it, it is nothing, and to clasp for wind is... It (whatever it is) is everything only if it is nothing to me; it is nothing only if it is everything to me.

The sensate is valued as nothing only because inwardness is valued as everything -- and yet, if I value inwardness as everything, it too is nothing. So balance is what is needed -- a balance of zero value on both sides, externality and inwardness. Absolute valuelessness is what is needed for optimal happiness. The inner sanctifies the outer, and the outer sanctifies the inner. A prerequisite is that both terms (the outer and the inner) must be there, and they can only both fully be there in perfect balance with one another. It's like two sides of an equation -- they both obviously must be equal; one can't be negative and another positive.

Consider infinity or inwardness or a life lived dedicted to God, or meaning, or truth, etc. as I.
Consider finitude or externality or a life lived dedicated to the earth, etc. as F.

+I = -F
or
-I = +F
or
I = F

Too much inwardness causes a negation of finitude; example: a person bending towards abstraction, who can't quite optimally live in the sense that he consistently wills himself into the real world. Think of philosophers or mathematicians or poets. They value their abstractions.

Too much finitude causes a negation of infinity; example: a person bending towards externality, sensations. Think of the alcoholic, the clothes-loving sorotity chick. They value their instances of finitude.

Infinity balanced with finitude -- thought balanced with action. Doing what one ought to do (finitude) the moment one grasps it (infinity).

You are the equation.

Goal: value nothing. Not your car, not your wife, not your khakis; not your mathematical ideas, or your philosophical abstractions, or your bloody thoughts. And in not valuing them you'll gain the most that can be gained from them -- because there is equality, and with equality comes perfection for both terms. Movement with content, not content without movement, or movement without content. But you can't simply not value by fiat; you will value something by necessity. A third factor is needed. What is it?

I call it the Logos. It exists in abstraction -- but as pure abstraction it is valued as abstraction, and I need something beyond abstraction -- I also need finitude. So: it must exist in a perfect balance between abstraction and finitude, and this is possible only through living it out.

You see, commandment isn't left for the slaves, for the subordinate of the world. Commandment, if it is inwardly qualified (i.e., through the Logos, the Word, the Meaning), is the most precious thing in the history of the cosmos for human beings. Logos commandment allows for the balance between finitude and infinity, action and thought. Without commandment life, in the perfected qualitative sense, could not be possible. If a human being did not have an eternal consciousness...

So now it makes sense. To love the will of God -- that really makes sense. And if God is understood as founded in his will, just as we are founded in our wills (we are our freedom), and the will of God is synonymous with the Logos (for a Word needs to be written), and the Logos is as much God as the writer of this Logos, then to love the will of God is nothing less than to love God.

Brilliant.

Test

Think. If you become stripped of everything, if you are left with absolutely nothing, do you: turn to God, or have God revealed?

That is, speaking in the present, are you not a Christian, or are you a Christian?

Contingent religiosity is falsity.

Happiness as Criteria Fulfillment

Culture is existentially dangerous, especially in relation to happiness: it provides certain criteria, relative to one's own culture, as to what constitutes happiness. But the human being cannot be understood collectively. Each is his own little snowflake, really; each has specifications that need subtle fulfillment in order for happiness to be actualized.

"I have a beautiful car, a mansion house, an attractive wife, and disciplined children. I have to be happy," says the man.
"I have nothing; I am dying death," says the soul.

You may live your entire life interpreting happiness through your own cultural rubric (while almost certainly looking down on other rubrics because they aren't yours). But you transcend your type; man as a type is a contradiction: to exist is to exist with absolute particularity; to exist is to be incomparable. If you don't listen to yourself, your happiness may very well be your misery, and your misery may very well be your possible happiness. Therefore be miserable. Blessed are the culturally miserable!

Pensee

Stranded in the nakedness of absurdity. That is, expecting from life what it refuses to provide. The true religious impulse finds its being in this feeling, for inhaled absurdity is despair, and despair is the realization of the need for a higher hope. But the hope cannot be provided through earthly hands. Therefore God.

And Vladimir Says

And yet we did know -- didn't we? -- inspiration,
we would live, it seemed, and our books would grow,
but the kithless muses at lasts have destroyed us,
and it is time now for us to go.
-- Nabokov

Meditation

As the alcoholic slovenly sings, inspired
By the dead love of his chemical muse.
As the stillborn stars stare with brightness,
Puncturing the velvet darkness of the night.
As the insomniac twists and turns
In his breaking bed, thinking, thinking.

As all these things transpire,
I sit thinking of God,
And he thinks of me,
And I sneeze away my worries,
And everything lovely comes alive:
That is, everything.

2:22 AM

So Shakespeare met Nabokov,
And Nabokov met Shakespeare,
At place such and such,
At no time in particular.
They both sat and stared,
Sat and stared,
Both with tired eyes,
And then said "wow!"
As they shook hands
With friendly half-smiles.
And as they walked away
You could see them both
Pulling pens from their pockets,
And me laughing in the background,
Like a child, like a child.

+1

Happiness
Is
Synthesis
Between
Within
And
Without

+1

Is life good because...? Then, deeply, life isn't good.

So (ver. Politics)

The satellite installation man (yes) tells me that he's against the democratic redistribution of wealth.

I ask him why. He says: everyone should earn as much relative to their intelligence.

I tell him that intelligence is heavily genetic (a variable potentially up to 80%, contra 20% environmentally affected), and ask him if he thinks it fair that a person should be relatively screwed (that is, in relation to others) because he's, you know, born, and, you know, being born brings with it a heavily genetically determined level of intelligence.

He reassembles his premises, and says the same damn thing.

I think: you're selfish.
He thinks: me, me.

Four Lines

Our tears are born between the burning spaces
Of have and want. What matters the ugly face,
The rejected soul, the dark depressive sighs
When all is made equal, when greed levels all?