"...The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is. All these people thinking they're hardheaded materialistic types, they don't know shit about matter, their heads are so full of dreamy ideas and notions." [Japhy] raised his hand. "Listen to that quail calling."

I recalled with a twinge of sadness how Japhy was always so dead serious about food, and I wished the whole world was dead serious about food instead of silly rockets and machines and explosives using everybody's food money to blow their heads off anyway.

Dharma Bums, Kerouac

Recognizing that important moods and feelings are often denied or covered up, Ranulf looks for clues by examining traits which were imputed to the Gods by the Athenians. He finds that the Gods are depicted as jealous beings who frequently impose deprivations upon men who have done nothing to damage them. The act of punishment, awful as it might be, is disinterested in origin. The inference is that the Athenians of the time were particularly envious of the rich and powerful, and that the moral indignation of the lesser middle classes was rooted in envy, which found partial expression in comprehensive and stringent codes. Ranulf recognizes that envy presupposes a perspective in which the ego perceives that it might enjoy a higher degree of participation in social values (wealth, power, respect, and the like) [and that such participation is desirable].

Harold D. Lasswell in his preface to Ranulf's Moral Indignation and Middle Class Psychology

Here as in all other places where we are concerned with men who are living, the words of loan and influence are worse than useless; the analytical method that sifts out the minds of men into shreds - ideas from somewhere and images or forms from elsewhere - ought to take a rest after having succeeded through the history of religion and literature and other branches of history, in laying waste the world of living men and turning them into a heap of intellectual debris.

Grønbech

...For there is no doubt a truth in the view that [people] taken by and large, and neglecting individual differences, are capable of a kind of rational self-control which no other animal attains. Couple this with the persistent recognitions of individual differences which is found throughout Aristotle as an inheritor of the Greek medical tradition, and it seems persuasive that the way of life for man as man would center around the control of the self by reason. Actually hidden premises are involved and hidden preferences. For it would by no means follow that it is best for each individual, or even for [humankind], to give over the control of life to that which differentiates [people] from other animals; it would not necessarily be to the advantage of animals with a physical organ which no other animal possessed to favor the unrestrained growth of that organ or its dominance over all other organs.

Charles W. Morris, Paths of Life

Whatever becomes of the world,
at least this happened.

Forebears

The ideal attitude is that of generalized detached-attachment. For it would seem as though an attachment to all phases of the self would require at the same time an attitude of detachment from any particular phase of the self in order to prevent it from usurping the active expression of the other phases. The resulting attitude would result in both detachment and attachment, generalized to embrace each phase of the self, and extended to the whole self, to the universe, and to the attitude of detached-attachment itself.

Charles Morris, Paths of Life

Why do you not think of him as the coming one, imminent from all eternity, the future one, the final fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? What keeps you from projecting his birth into coming ages and living your life like a painful and beautiful day in the history of a great gestation? Do you not see, how everything that happens is always beginning again, and could it not be his beginning, since beginning in itself is always so beautiful? If he is the most perfect, must not the lesser be before him, so that he can select himself out of fulness and overflow? Must not he be the last, in order to include everything in himself, and what sense would we have if he, whom we long for, had already been?

Rilke

there ain't no lobos out here. no, there ain't no lobos out here. they are with you under the covers, 
running wild in your heart and ravaging it. but they too will starve in time.

Patterns

Reposting an excerpt from a previous post because I think it deserves to be seen on its own:

All of existence is a collection of patterns and it follows that the world is had through a well-developed pattern language. Patterns are even more fundamental than mathematics, which is simply an abstract articulation of approximations of them. Patterns, to be momentarily tautological, are simply arrangements of things (for lack of a better term; "things" here denotes every delimitable component of every dimension and scale of existence). Patterns are always being naturally selected for; natural selection is thorough, universal, acting on every arrangement within every layer of existence*. For example, ideas - something which some would say do not exist physically - are arrangements of concepts (or arrangements of chemical transmissions (or quantum events)) and thus patterns and these patterns, as all, are constantly being naturally selected for. For example, an idea may be extremely successful in the short-run, which is to say that it is very fecund, prevalent in the short-run, and we may then - our perspectives being naturally immediate - say that it is of high quality. But that pattern, that idea, may eventually result in the total destruction of the only environment in which it is adapted to subsist, the Earth via human neurology, in which case it would be a very unsuccessful pattern, a pattern of very low quality (you could say that human neurology is a type of ecosystem in which ideas are able to thrive; they reconstruct themselves by mingling with other ideas from other ecosystems (thus exchanging "memes" and selecting for the "best" through "corridors", i.e. means of communication)). We arrive, then, at a methodology for parsing out existence and evaluating the quality of individual patterns found therein. This methodology - and it is correct - tells us that the idea that we ought to consume wholesale our environment - our sustaining patterns - is not a pattern of very high quality. Both in physical and aesthetic (aphysical) terms, because it precludes a respectful relationship with the larger patterns, therefore fostering a dysfunctional perspective on living/pattern-making.

(And we also arrive at a potential theory of "God").

I would say that a pattern of high quality is constantly advocating for its own existence and especially the existence of the larger patterns in which it is necessarily nested. As well it is living, which is to say responsive, which is to say charming, which is being both outwardly perceptive and inwardly inviting, which is to say open - for the greater patterns in which all "lesser" patterns necessarily subsist as well the smaller patterns of which all "greater" patterns consist are themselves always changing. We arrive at a moral framework: the most beautiful pattern is always the best and what is most beautiful in any given circumstance is never precisely the same as any other (which is to either suggest to redefine "beauty" or to clarify the generally implied meaning: beauty is patterning of ultimately good quality). 

Morality is a consideration of aesthetic patterns. The optimal moral decision in any moment is that which would render the best - that is, most ultimately successful - pattern over all moments which are ever to transpire. Since we cannot of any moment project all others, the pattern must be alive, adaptive. And since moral decisions for humans are typically expressed as stories, narratives, we might say that the best moral decision in any moment is the one that would make for the most ultimately beautiful, fundamentally affirming story. The most authentically invigorating. 

Toward architecture: think of materials, concrete for example. Concrete only degrades as it ages. It is dead, it is meant to not change which is then to say that it only ever responds to its environment - when it does, which is rarely - in a way which compromises its own integrity which is to say that concrete is a pattern which requires the constant application of energy for its own existence. Now, maintenance is not necessarily a detrimental requirement (this is where I will lead to my justification of the term "beauty" [see: excerpt on Mayan ritualism from a previous post]). But the energy application that concrete requires, for example, is specific to an extremely rare percentile of a specific species which does not enjoy that particular application of energy required. Modern buildings (generally) only degrade with age - they are at their highest quality when they are new - and yet they do not invite maintenance both because the specific requirements are not easily parsed from their form and because the specific maintenance they require is not pleasant or illuminating for those patterns, us, required to apply it. Which is to say that modern buildings are inherently dysfunctional but, even worse, they offend the patterns upon which their existence depends. This, for some, has already been proven. For the rest, it shall be in time. Contrast, for example, the unmortared stone-foundations of Central and South America: their integrity is actually improved by the action of earthquakes.  

I would also argue that modern architecture hides from us both the existence of and the need to engage complexity, thus disposing us to stories which lack the necessary complexity or openness to assimilate themselves into the greater world and thus to be of lasting quality.

Now, as a violin apprentice, I would like to use the example of violins. I believe that violins are a particularly successful pattern because they invite and exalt the patterns upon which they depend. For example, a quality violin is built to be easily taken apart (with hide-glue) and thus maintained, it is also built with material that is alive, responsive, and is said to not only get more aesthetically pleasing as it ages and is acted upon, but to also get more acoustically pleasing. We could say that a violin is a very successful symbiote (organism [lungism]) that depends for its existence upon the manipulation of human emotions and the affirmation of human intellect - it mimics the human form, proportions, the human voice, particularly its most expressive moments; it is saturated with living patterns of parseable intent (wood grain) in which we have been steeped for all of our biological history and which bring us pleasure to rationalize and mentally order; it is a form which is generally sensually pleasant to construct and deconstruct; and it is a form which allows certain inclined persons to use as a tool to gain control and power themselves (by captivating an audience [how illuminating!]) by offering pleasure, not painful force, to an audience. It is also a form of great scientific refinement which is sympathetic and properly responsive to the greater physical patterns of gravity, mass, pressure, etc., in which it is required to subsist. Even at its beginning, Galileo was compelled to comment on the exquisite quality of its pattern and now we have violins upwards of 3 centuries old which yet well exist and as a good representations of themselves and which we divert enormous resources, emotional and physical, toward the maintenance of - when it is not even necessary! If violins did/do require the destruction of the environment upon which their creators and thus they themselves depend, they will/would ultimately prove to be a pattern lacking in quality, evidenced by the snuffing out of their own propagation. But trial and error is not necessary with a thoroughly developed pattern language.

Now to expand upon a previous point: Beauty is a state of being which advocates for the maintenance of existence - beauty exalts existence and thus advocates for the only material in which beauty is to subsist, existence, and thus advocates for the only pattern which can render/transmit beauty, life. 

We also arrive at a more fundamental condition for fulfillment - it is not freedom. Freedom is not achievable, proven by our necessary subsistence in greater patterns. Do we desire to be gravitationally independent? What we truly seek is to be as ultimately precious as possible. 

A word on experience:

Experience is essentially the data our brain collects, via our set of senses, in order to figure out the patterned-tendencies of the world so that it may pursue a refinement of quality of response. The more experience one has, the more data, and the higher the complexity, the more representative the quality, the more likely any given response is going to be effective. The human brain is hardwired to act on experiences. Thus, experience is important for one's growth and any act that goes against one's experience (and instinctual predispositions which have proven to be so generally appropriate that it was apparently a good adaptation to have them genetically encoded; a curiosity: epigenetics) shall result in an internal schism, anxiety. It also follows that if any system wishes to co-opt people's decision-making, it will co-opt their experiences; see: public school, film/TV, modern architecture, western civilization, et al...

Rest assured, there are greater patterns in which we all reside and they tirelessly measure right from wrong - like your immune system, like gravity. And, as a pattern which likewise encloses others, it is your duty to do the same. And our ultimate beauty, our ultimate victory - if we reach it - will be in doing what the cells of which we consist cannot: being not only true to one's nature, but further in understanding and articulating, and perhaps even crafting, toward what more exquisite end.

*Natural selection justified/explained:

Writing of any importance often feels like the terrifying task of defusing a minefield. Such phrases as "natural selection" unavoidably evoke in readers some combination of unpredictable and necessarily subjective  - sometimes explosive - associations with the rhetorical flotsam of the overwhelming historical wreckage that we have all been forced to wade through. It is the frustration of writers to have the in-between lines remain unwritten in the reader's mind, leaving room for the infuriatingly premature, often reactive, scribblings of their  own prejudices. So here is my intent, clarified: natural selection, as I mean it, is axiomatic. It is the basic law which tells us that things (not exclusively biological) which persist, persist; things which either are in themselves able to survive for long periods of time or are somehow adept at reproducing themselves are "naturally selected for". It seems tautological and self-evident to say that "things which sustain themselves sustain themselves" but we have inferred pathetically little with the idea. And neither have we focused it on the more fundamental processes of the universe or extrapolated it to the moral predicament of humankind. Such is the problem with history, myth; we have a couple of characters: Darwin, Dawkins. Their parts are played through, the script read, and the curtains drop on our own critical thought. The ideas presented are mere dialogue which is to be recited only by them, in this way, we feel. And such is the problem with elevating our geniuses, with defining ourselves by -isms (Darwinism, etc.). They are all fallible. Their work is always unfinished. We are they. They are us. And so have I set my sights.

But life is indeed drama, as Jose Ortega y Gasset so eloquently demonstrated in my last post. And we must be careful to not spend much time distracted by the desperate theatrics of the massive, phantasmagoric beast we call History. We are discrete, though submerged and mediated, moments of existence and the great privilege, the necessary salvation, of the universe is to have this drama renew itself with such persistent grace. So the focus should always be on one's own drama - not to imply that it would be small, isolated. Rather to imply that we have been overtaken by a pernicious pattern and have become identical with it, that we articulate intent without seeing that it is not our own. And neither, does it seem to me, is it The Universe's. So we have been given a drama as tremendous as creation itself. Dive in. Find your role by learning yourself and your setting. Say "okay, I'll be a part of this world". Put your soul at hazard. 

The secret is that, though you will find yourself turning away from the teleprompter, you will not be sacrificing a thing. In fact, you sacrifice more by not making the choice. And, the even more secret secret is that it's a hell of a lot of fun. This is an exciting time to be alive. Shit, I suspect they all are.

Alas, McCarthy comes to mind, strangely:

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. 

The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

...

What is my trade?

War. War is your trade. Is it not?

And it aint yours?

Mine too. Very much so.

What about all them notebooks and bones and stuff?

All other trades are contained in that of war.

Is that why war endures?

No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.

That's your notion.

The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principles and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.

Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man's hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man's worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hands is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.

Substitute drama for war or war for drama and you see that at the core of existence is an insatiable, and thankfully so, aesthetic longing.

We know naught of what we don't know.

An excerpt from Jose Ortega y Gasset's The Self and the Other:

Far from thought having been bestowed upon man, the truth is - a truth which I cannot now properly argue but can only state - that he has continually been creating thought, making it little by little, by dint of a discipline, a culture or cultivation, a millennial effort over many millennia, without having yet succeeded - far from it - in finishing his work. Not only was thought not given to man from the first, but even at this point in history he has only succeeded in forming a small portion and a crude form of what in the simple and ordinary sense of the word we call thought. And even the small portion gained being an acquired and not a constitutive quality, is always in danger of being lost, and considerable quantities of it have been lost, many times in fact, in the past, and today we are on the point of losing it again. To this extent, unlike all the other being in the universe, man is never surely man; on the contrary, being man signifies precisely being always on the point of not being man, being a living problem, an absolute hazardous adventure, or, as I am wont to say: being, in essence, drama! Because there is drama only when we do not know what is going to happen, so that every instant is pure peril and shuddering risk. While the tiger cannot cease being a tiger, cannot be detigered, man lives in the perpetual risk of being dehumanized. With him, not only is it problematic and contingent, whether this or that will happen to him, as it is with the other animals, but at time what happens to man is nothing less than ceasing to be man [whether he will or will not happen to existence and in what way]. And this is true not only abstractly and generically but it holds for our own individuality. Each one of us is always in peril of not being the unique and untransferable self which he [or she] is. The majority of men [and women] perpetually betray this self which is waiting to be; and to tell the whole truth our personal individuality is a personage which is never completely realized. A stimulating Utopia, a secret legend, which each of us guards in the bottom of his heart. It is thoroughly comprehensible that Pindar resumed his heroic ethics in the well-known imperative: "Become what you are."

The condition of man, then, is essential uncertainty. Hence the cogency of the gracefully mannered mot of a fifteenth century Burgundian gentleman: "Rien ne m'es sure que la chose incertaine." "I am sure of nought save the uncertain." 

No human acquisition is stable. Even what appears to us most completely won and consolidated can disappear in a few generations. The thing we call "civilization" - all these physical and moral comforts, all these conveniences, all these shelters, all these virtues and disciplines which have become habit now, on which we count, and which in effect constitute a repertory or system of securities which man made for himself like a raft in the initial shipwreck which living always is - all these securities are insecure securities which in the twinkling of an eye, at the least carelessness, escape from man's hands and vanish like phantoms. History tells us of innumerable retrogressions, of decadences and degenerations. But nothing tells us that there is no possibility of much more basic retrogressions than any so far known, including the most basic of them all: the total disappearance of man as man and his silent return to the animal scale, to complete and definitive absorption in the other. The fate of culture, the destiny of man, depends upon our maintaining that dramatic consciousness ever alive in our inmost being, and upon our feeling, like a murmuring counterpoint in our entrails, that we are only sure of insecurity.

[Here I would like to interject the words of a woman, Helen Keller: 

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.]

No small part of the anguish which is today tormenting the soul of the West derives from the fact that during the past century - and perhaps for the first time in history - man reached the point of believing himself secure. Because the truth is that the one and only thing he succeeded in doing was to feel and create the pharmaceutical Monsieur Homais, the net result of progressivism!  The progressivist idea consists in affirming not only that humanity - an abstract, irresponsible, non-existent entity invented for the occasion - that humanity progresses, which is certain, but furthermore that it progresses necessarily. This idea anaesthetized the European and the American to that basic feeling of risk which is the substance of man. Because if humanity inevitably progresses, that is almost saying that we can abandon all watchfulness, stop worrying, throw off all responsibility, or as we say in Spain, "snore away" and let humanity bear us inevitably to perfection and pleasure. Human history thus loses all the sinew of drama and is reduced to a peaceful tourist trip, organized by some transcendent "Cook's". Traveling thus securely toward its fulfillment, the civilization in which we are embarked would be like that Phaeacian ship in Homer which sailed straight to port without a pilot [though to assign a single pilot would be, and has been, just as devastating]. This security is what we are now paying for. That, gentlemen, is one of the reasons why I told you that I am not a progressivist. That is why I  prefer to renew in myself, at frequent intervals, the emotion aroused in my youth by Hegel's words at the beginning of his Philosophy of History: "When we contemplate the past, that is, history," he says "the first thing we see is nothing but - ruins."

Let us, in passing, seize the opportunity to see, from the elevation of this vision, the element of frivolousness, and even of marked vulgarity, in Nietzsche's famous imperative: "Live dangerously." (Which, furthermore, is not Nietzsche's but the exaggeration of an old Italian Renaissance motto, which Nietzsche, I believe, must have known through Burckhardt. The Italians of today, especially the super-Italians of today, nevertheless go about shouting Nietzsche's motto. Because it is characteristic of the contemporary supernationalist to be ignorant of his nation, of the rich past of his nation. Otherwise, instead of taking Nietzsche's version, the Italians could have learned, directly from Ariosto, a motto which is different and the same: Vivere risolutamente.) Because he does not say "Live alertly," which would have been good; but, "Live dangerously." And this shows that Nietzsche, despite his genius, did not know that the very substance of our life is danger and that hence it is rather affected - not to say trying to hard for an effect - to propose us as something new, added and original that we should seek and collect danger. And idea, furthermore, which is typical of the period which called itself "fin de siecle," and which will be known in history - it culminated about 1900 - as the period in which man felt himself most secure and, at the same time, as the epoch - with its stiff shirts and frock-coats, its femme fatales, its affectation of perverseness, and its Barresian cult of the "I" - of shoddy vulgarity par excellence. In every period there are ideas which I would call "fishing" ideas, ideas which are expressed and proclaimed precisely because it is known that they will not come to pass; which are thought of only as a game, as foolishness - some years ago, for example, there was a rage in England for wolf stories, because England is a country where the last wolf was killed in 1663 and hence has no authentic experience of wolves. In a period which has no strong experience of insecurity, like the fin de siecle period, they play at the dangerous life.

Enough of all this - thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.

With this idea in mind, you will understand that I see an element of absurdity in the definition of man put forth by Linnaeus and the eighteenth century: homo sapiens. Because if we take this expression in good faith, it can mean only that man, in effect, knows - in other words, that he knows all that he needs to know. Now nothing is further from the reality. Man has never known what he needed to know. But if we understand homo sapiens in the sense that man knows some things, a very few things, but does not know the remainder, it would seem to me more appropriate to define him as homo insciens, insipiens, as man the un-knowing. And certainly, if we were not now in such a hurry, we could see the good judgment with which Plato defines man precisely by his ignorance. Ignorance is, in fact, man's privilege. Neither God nor beast is ignorant - the former because he possesses all knowledge, the latter because he needs none. 

It is clear, then, that man does not exercise his thought because he finds it amusing, but because, obliged as he is to live submerged in the world and to force his way among things, he finds himself under the necessity of organizing his psychic activities, which are not very different from those of the anthropoid, in the form of thought - which is what the animal does not do.

Man, then, rather than by what he is, than by what he has, escapes from the zoological scale by what he does, by his conduct. Hence it is that he must always be watchful of himself. 

This is something of what I should like to suggest in the phrase (which appears to be but a phrase) that we do not live in order to think but that we think in order to succeed in subsisting or surviving. And you see how this attributing thought to man as an innate quality - which at first seems to be a homage and even a compliment to our species - is, strictly speaking, an injustice. Because there is no such gift, no such gratuity; thought, on the contrary, is a laborious fabrication and a conquest which, like every conquest, be it of a city or of a [person], is always unstable and fugitive.

This consideration of thought was necessary as an aid to understanding my earlier statement that man is primarily and fundamentally action. In passing, let us do homage to the first man who arrived at this truth with such clarity; it was not Kant or Fichte, it was that inspired madman Auguste Comte.

We saw that action is not a random fisticuffs with the things around us or with our fellow men: that is the infrahuman, that is subjection to the other. Action is to act upon the material environment or upon other men in accordance with a plan conceived [or perceived] in a previous period of contemplation or thought. There is then, no authentic action if there is no thought, and there is no authentic thought if it is not duly referred to action and made virile by its relation to action. 

But this relation - which is the true one - between action and contemplation has been persistently misunderstood. When the Greeks discovered that man thought, that there existed in the universe that strange reality known as thought (until then man had not thought, or, like the bourgeois gentilhomme, had done so without knowing it), they felt such an enthusiasm for ideas that they conferred upon intelligence, upon the logos, the supreme rank in the universe. Compared with it, everything else seemed to them ancillary and contemptible. And as we tend to project into God what ever appears to us to be the best, the Greeks, with Aristotle, reached the point of maintaining that God had no other occupation but to think. And not even to think about things - that seemed to them, as it were, a debasement of the intellectual process. No, according to Aristotle, God does nothing but think about thought - which is to convert God into an intellectual, or, more precisely, into a modest professor of philosophy. - But I  repeat that, for them, this was the most sublime thing in the world and the most sublime thing which a being could do. Hence they believe that man's destiny was solely to exercise his intellect, that man had come into the world to meditate, or, in our terminology, to take a stand within himself (ensimismarse).

This doctrine has been given the name "intellectualism"; it is an idolatry of the intelligence which isolates thought from its setting, from its function in the general economy of human life. As if man thinks because he thinks, and not because, whether he will or not, he has to think in order to maintain himself among things! As if thought could awaken and function of its own motion, as if it began and ended in itself, and were not - as is the true state of the case - engendered by action and having its roots and its end in action! We owe innumerable things of the highest value to the Greeks, but they have put chains on us too. The man of the West still lives, to no small degree, enslaved by the preferences of the men of Greece - preferences which, operating in the subsoil of our culture, have for eight centuries turned us from our proper and authentic Occidental vocation. The heaviest of these chains is "intellectualism"; and now, when it is imperative that we change our course and take a new road, in short, get on the right track - it is of the greatest importance that we resolutely rid ourselves of this archaic attitude, which has been carried to its extreme during these last two centuries. 

And from Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

I shall start [Chapter 4] by reaffirming that men, as beings of the praxis, differ from animals, which are beings of pure activity. Animals do not consider the world; they are immersed in it. In contrast, men emerge from the world, objectify it, and in so doing can understand and transform it with their labor.

Animals, which do not labor, live in a setting which they cannot transcend. Hence, each animal species lives in the context appropriate to it, and these contexts, while open to men, cannot communicate among themselves.

But men's activity consists of action and reflection: it is praxis; it is transformation of the world [rather, I would say, that the world is in an interminable state of transformation; men's proper activity consists in being a steward for its authenticity and proper "naming"]. And as praxis, it requires theory to illuminate it. Men's activity is theory and practice; it is reflection and action. It cannot, as I stressed in Chapter 2, be reduced to either verbalism or activism.

Lenin's famous statement: "Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement" means that a revolution is achieved with neither verbalism nor activism, but rather with praxis, that is, with reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed. The revolutionary effort to transform these structures radically cannot designate its leaders as its thinkers and the oppressed as mere doers.

If true commitment to the people, involving the transformation of the reality by which they are oppressed, requires a theory of transforming action, this theory cannot fail to assign the people a fundamental role in the transformation process. The leaders cannot treat the oppressed as mere activists to be denied the opportunity of reflection and allowed merely the illusion of acting, whereas in fact they would continue to be manipulated - and in this case by the presumed foes of manipulation.

The leaders to bear the responsibility for co-ordination - and, at times, direction - but leaders who deny praxis to the oppressed thereby invalidate their own praxis. By imposing their word on others, they falsify that word and establish a contradiction between their methods and their objectives. if they are truly committed to liberation, their action and reflection cannot proceed without the action and reflection of others. 

Revolutionary praxis must stand opposed to the praxis of the dominant elites, for they are by nature antithetical. Revolutionary praxis cannot tolerate an absurd dichotomy in which the praxis of the people is merely that of following the leaders' decisions - a dichotomy reflecting the prescriptive methods of the dominant elites. Revolutionary praxis is a unity, and the leaders cannot treat the oppressed as their possession.

Manipulation, sloganizing, "depositing," regimentation, and prescription cannot be components of revolutionary praxis, precisely because they are components of the praxis of domination. In order to dominate, the dominator has no choice but to deny true praxis to the people, deny them the right to say their own word and think their own thoughts. He cannot act dialogically; for him to do so would mean either that he had relinquished his power to dominate and joined the cause of the oppressed, or that he had lost that power through miscalculation.

Obversely, revolutionary leaders who do not act dialogically in their relations with the people either have retained characteristics of the dominator and are not truly revolutionary; or they are totally misguided in their conception [perception] of their role, and, prisoners of their own sectarianism, are equally non-revolutionary. They may even reach power. But the validity of any revolution resulting from anti-dialogical action is thoroughly doubtful.

Alright, I gotta go to work but I may resume later with a response.

On Vocation

Of these things I am not certain, which is why I write them; a thing can only be refined when fixed in place, motionless. 

But I have a strong sense that I am a good man who deserves to be. Also that, if I have failed at anything, it's letting people know me. I am not normal, and thankful for it. I think women are the greatest thing to grace the Earth and, more than anything, I would like to someday raise a child with one. It seems the ultimate artistic pursuit. But the world, though beautiful, is in an ugly way - we all know this and feel this and do an exquisite job of distracting ourselves from it. I consider it a part of my vocation as a father to tend the ground of which I must raise up my child and I'm excited at the enormous prospect of real work. This vocation begins long before I meet my child's mother, it began long before now, long before my father met my mother. It was written in the darkness before the passage of time was first felt.

This is a serious commitment to life and we do nothing but pacify ourselves from diving headlong into the anticipation which has been riveted a part of us by ugly patterns which appear to prevail, and only appear to. Likewise, we compulsively add layers of inauthentic, arbitrary complexity to avoid commitment to these essential questions.

These layers which are really shackles dressed up in sugar.

We are complicit in our own bondage and thank our captors because they have respected our will to "choose", but more precisely they have given us a set of options. We vote for this hood-ornament and not that hood-ornament and tell ourselves that we are free, in control, that our direction has changed and as propelled by a new engine.

We hate our fellow slaves because their humanity impinges upon our delusion, because they demand our love as we do theirs yet we were none ever taught how to give it.

We say that if I write this song of all songs, choose this color Volkswagen of all Volkswagens, pay for this customized license plate of all license plates, I will have expressed my true, inimitable self and thank you so much for your infinite grace, for letting me be.

If I hold this opinion of this book he will respect me, if I wear this outfit of all outfits she will love me, if I listen to this band of all bands they will be my friends. If I go to this school of all schools for this degree of all degrees I will live a long, beautiful life. If I study abroad in this place of all places (if I join this sorority/fraternity of all sororities/fraternities, if I watch this movie of all movies) I will have real, profound experiences. If I leave the last pinch of saffron in the jar someone will notice and understand that I am not a cook but a chef. If I order this whisky instead of that whiskey the bartender will see that I am a real man. If I choose cats over dogs - forever, for always - I will have fulfilled my destiny. Maybe I will even name my own something meaningful, unique. I am not but superficial idiosyncrasies and the combinations are inexhaustible - for this I am grateful. I will deserve your love.

Alas, this is not an inherent drive but a circumstantial one which has already been thoroughly explored elsewhere. I will try to avoid the tedium of facts. Fuck 'em.

Bit of a cover letter I had written for a pamphlet I distributed at The U:

...Imagine that you awake for the first time in the strange, heaving belly of a colossal ship. Like a second womb, you are dimly kept by a complex network of piping, actuating pistons, rotating shafts. Their mechanisms, intentions, designs are a mystery but they are your wilderness, and they come to be your comfort. The periodic, anonymous bong of expanding metal, the ping of bebubbled piping, the hiss and sigh of myriad valvework are nothing but the tapestry of life, unremarkable. These intricate mechanisms are your reference and it is not your job to understand them. Your guts eventually calibrate to the imperceivable swaying of the sea and over time you are well adapted to this rhythm, but there remains a nagging dissonance which you cannot define, a latent anxiety which you accept as inherent to life.

One day at a certain age, after having achieved certain milestones in training, you are told to shovel coal into a furnace. And you are told, at an implicitly understood gunpoint, "keep this ship moving or else this coal it burns is worth nothing", as well to "keep this ship going forward, always to a new place lest its passengers get bored of the ride".

You were born far from shore - what is shore? 

The ship's living passengers are sons and daughters of passengers who were themselves born on the ship, and so on stretching back ambiguously. Even so for the men holding guns. And each night as the vast water turns deep and dark - distending its surface restlessly, like gargantuan, dreaming lungwork - the passengers gather and ingest a history of the ship's travels: portions of its journey they themselves had never experienced but they ingest and ingest and ingest as images and beguiling-isms rendered from the original pith like a sweet, perfidious liquor so they can ride with conviction that where they are and where they are going is purposeful, by design - even if they are not privy to it. You ingest these stories and become identical with them.

And you are all told that if you do not work you cannot pay your admission to the ship but there is never stopping at the shore, no offer or instruction to alternative. If you want off, you must swim without direction. And the water is cold.

This image is a metaphor, of course. Apt? Daft? I ask simply to let the seed lie, it can do only one of two things. Perhaps you've already obtained a level of perspective. That would be good...

...All other things aside, I want to ask: why are you doing things you don't enjoy so that you might, in the unknown future, do something which only vaguely resembles the pursuit of that which you currently value? Is this school even pursuant of beauty, however obviously misguided its methods? 

Finally: do not be afraid to rebel. In any system of normalization, self-realization necessarily and always is a process of rebellion. Sincerity itself is rebellion! Take it slow, in small steps. Break little, silly laws when no one is watching. Have real fun. Tomorrow, walk with eyes open and make a small, honest motion toward justice. There is no action too tiny. But let them grow when they desire, carefully, by the aesthetics which so courageously persist in your heart. And live to fight another day. 

I have never been more excited about the prospect of my life than after stepping onto this path. It is not hard for long.

Does it really matter who's captain if the ship is sinking?
Do we enjoy the ride? Understand the destination?

Michel Tournier wrote two books which will forever throb within me. Gemini speaks of quarries, quarries within quarries, of digging meticulously to the flawless pearls nestled among flesh, fruits, to the grain of sand which was the seed and further to the grain's soul which longed to be embraced prettily. Of opening the universe's gift of exquisiteness instead of trying to suffocate it. Friday speaks of a man who chips away at himself, driven by circumstance, and retreats into the egg of the Earth to find his negative carved in stone, a dedicated womb. He experiences himself as a seed, as an image of the seed which is nested inside of him, the sprout yet unfurled in the almond, a process. His entelechy. These books are not literally but architecturally related, in the space of Tournier's soul and thus mine through having read him. 

I wander. A quick word on my motivations, methods: I utterly lack discipline. When I write, it is without goal, outline, or much editing. I hope that it is authentic and reasonably coherent. I suppose I aim simply to plant seeds since, as much as I lie to myself about it, I doubt I will ever actively pursue any formalization or organizational refinement in my work.

Here are some things I have already written:

All of existence is a collection of patterns and it follows that the world is had through a well-developed pattern language. Patterns are even more fundamental than mathematics, which is simply an abstract articulation of them. Patterns, to be momentarily tautological, are simply arrangements of things (for lack of a better term; "things" here denotes every delimitable component of every dimension and scale of existence). Patterns are always being naturally selected for; natural selection is thorough, universal, acting on every arrangement within every layer of existence. For example, ideas - something which some would say do not exist physically - are arrangements of concepts (or arrangements of chemical transmissions (or quantum events)) and thus patterns and these patterns, as all, are constantly being naturally selected for. For example, an idea may be extremely successful in the short-run, which is to say that it is very fecund, prevalent in the short-run, and we may then - our perspectives being naturally immediate - say that it is of high quality. But that pattern, that idea, may eventually result in the total destruction of the only environment in which it is adapted to subsist, the Earth via human neurology, in which case it would be a very unsuccessful pattern, a pattern of very low quality (you could say that human neurology is a type of ecosystem in which ideas are able to thrive; they reconstruct themselves by mingling with other ideas from other ecosystems (thus exchanging "memes" and selecting for the "best" through "corridors", i.e. means of communication). We arrive, then, at a methodology for parsing out existence and evaluating the quality of individual patterns found therein. This methodology - and it is correct - tells us that the idea that we ought to consume wholesale our environment - our sustaining patterns - is not a pattern of very high quality. Both in physical and aesthetic (aphysical) terms, because it precludes a respectful relationship with the larger patterns, therefore fostering a dysfunctional perspective on living/pattern-making. 

A pattern I smiled at today: skinny, summer squirrels
turning to fat, fall ones.

(And we also arrive at a potential theory of "God").

I would say that a pattern of high quality is constantly advocating for its own existence and especially the existence of the larger patterns in which it is necessarily nested. As well it is living, which is to say responsive, which is to say charming, which is being both outwardly perceptive and inwardly inviting, which is to say open - for the greater patterns in which all "lesser" patterns necessarily subsist as well the lesser patterns of which all "greater" patterns consist are themselves always changing. We arrive at a moral framework: the most beautiful pattern is always the best and what is most beautiful in any given circumstance is never precisely the same as any other (which is to either suggest to redefine "beauty" or to clarify the generally implied meaning: beauty is patterning of ultimately good quality). 

Morality is a consideration of aesthetic patterns. The optimal moral decision in any moment is that which would render the best - that is, most ultimately successful - pattern over all moments which are ever to transpire. Since we cannot of any moment project all others, the pattern must be alive, adaptive. And since moral decisions for humans are typically expressed as stories, narratives, we might say that the best moral decision in any moment is the one that would make for the most ultimately beautiful, fundamentally affirming story. The most authentically invigorating. 

Toward architecture: think of materials, concrete for example. Concrete only degrades as it ages. It is dead, it is meant to not change which is then to say that it only ever responds to its environment - when it does, which is rarely - in a way which compromises its own integrity which is to say that concrete is a pattern which requires the constant application of energy for its own existence. Now, maintenance is not necessarily a detrimental requirement (this is where I will lead to my justification of the term "beauty" [see: excerpt on Mayan ritualism from a previous post]). But the energy application that concrete requires, for example, is specific to an extremely rare percentile of a specific species which does not enjoy that particular application of energy required. Modern buildings (generally) only degrade with age - they are at their highest quality when they are new - and yet they do not invite maintenance both because the specific requirements are not easily parsed from their form and because the specific maintenance they require is not pleasant or illuminating for those patterns, us, required to apply it. Which is to say that modern buildings are inherently dysfunctional but, even worse, they offend the patterns upon which their existence depends. This, for some, has already been proven. For the rest, it shall be in time. Contrast, for example, the unmortared stone-foundations of Central and South America: their integrity is actually improved by the action of earthquakes.  

I would also argue that modern architecture hides from us both the existence of and the need to engage complexity, thus disposing us to stories which lack the necessary complexity or openness to assimilate themselves into the greater world and thus to be of lasting quality.

Now, as a violin apprentice, I would like to use the example of violins. I believe that violins are a particularly successful pattern because they invite and exalt the patterns upon which they depend. For example, a quality violin is built to be easily taken apart (with hide-glue) and thus maintained, it is also built with material that is alive, responsive, and is said to not only get more aesthetically pleasing as it ages and is acted upon, but to also get more acoustically pleasing. We could say that a violin is a very successful symbiote (organism [lungism]) that depends for its existence upon the manipulation of human emotions and the affirmation of human intellect - it mimics the human form, proportions, the human voice, particularly its most expressive moments; it is saturated with living patterns of parseable intent (wood grain) in which we have been steeped for all of our biological history and which bring us pleasure to rationalize and mentally order; it is a form which is generally sensually pleasant to construct and deconstruct; and it is a form which allows certain inclined persons to use as a tool to gain control and power themselves (by captivating an audience [how illuminating!]) by offering pleasure, not painful force, to an audience. It is also a form of great scientific refinement which is sympathetic and properly responsive to the greater physical patterns of gravity, mass, pressure, etc., in which it is required to subsist. Even at its beginning, Galileo was compelled to comment on the exquisite quality of its pattern and now we have violins upwards of 3 centuries old which yet well exist and as a good representations of themselves and which we divert enormous resources, emotional and physical, toward the maintenance of - when it is not even necessary! If violins did/do require the destruction of the environment upon which their creators and thus they themselves depend, they will/would ultimately prove to be a pattern lacking in quality, evidenced by the snuffing out of their own propagation. But trial and error is not necessary with a thoroughly developed pattern language. 

My back made in the golden method.

Now to expand upon a previous point: Beauty is a state of being which advocates for the maintenance of existence - beauty exalts existence and thus advocates for the only material in which beauty is to subsist, existence, and thus advocates for the only pattern which can render/transmit beauty, life. 

We also arrive at a more fundamental condition for fulfillment - it is not freedom. Freedom is not achievable, proven by our necessary subsistence in greater patterns. Do we desire to be gravitationally independent? What we truly seek is to be as ultimately precious as possible. 

A word on experience:

Experience is essentially the datum our brain collects, via our set of senses, in order to figure out the patterned-tendencies of the world so that it may pursue a refinement of quality of response. The more experience one has, the more data, and the higher the complexity, the more representative the quality, the more likely any given response is going to be effective. The human brain is hardwired to act on experiences. Thus, experience is important for one's growth and any act that goes against one's experience (and instinctual predispositions which have proven to be so generally appropriate that it was apparently a good adaptation to have them genetically encoded; a curiosity: epigenetics) shall result in an internal schism, anxiety. It also follows that if any system wishes to co-opt people's decision-making, it will co-opt their experiences; see: public school, film/TV, modern architecture, western civilization, et al.... 

Rest assured, there are greater patterns in which we all reside and they tirelessly measure right from wrong - like your immune system, like gravity. And, as a pattern which likewise encloses others, it is your duty to do the same. And our ultimate beauty, our ultimate victory - if we reach it - will be in doing what the cells of which we consist cannot: being not only true to one's nature, but further in understanding and articulating, and perhaps even crafting, toward what more exquisite end.

And:

...God does not wish to contain you, child. He seeks to be contained by you, as we intend with our own homes. You were meant to edge this warmth, to stand unclothed but by the unending night itself. As our homes we build to face the weather, the dark, for us. Darkness from which all things flee - into you.

So who is there among that vast silence to hold you, child? Upon whose lap may you lay your head? Who shall say "everything is alright, my love. Now rest."? But, like a home, if you are true to this essential will - the will to life - focused on and formed around this centripetal purpose, you shall be cherished and maintained, warmed from within. And when the time comes that you can no longer stand, when your very bones have rotted against all wishing, your value will call for your reconstruction. If not in physical likeness, always of spirit...

And:

One's "calling" is never occupational. What an insult to The Universe that would be. One's calling is always to be oneself, fully and authentically, in all of one's exquisiteness. The compulsion to define oneself by choosing an area of professional expertise and to sacrifice the prime years of one's vigor doing things one does not enjoy in order to accredit, usually arbitrarily, oneself toward that end - to, in essence, "legitimize" (legalize) one's existence - is utterly dishonest and disrespectful to oneself. It is ugly on the whole and would thus be shameful if it were not actually pitiful. This does not entail a turning away from the world, turning away from relations, an unabashed narcissism. The opposite is true.

Take joy in the fact that you will change, grow, become more yourself. Do not make it painful.

This was all somehow intended to be an introduction to my decision to emigrate to Mexico. May be expanded...

Acoustical architecture. Crusoe might have curled up in this.

Transientsce

...Sometimes I wonder why these people even want to be so damned convicted.

Aye... I reckon I ain't really the same about anythin from one day to the next, though we liken to pretend we ain't never changed of heart since first fartin unto God's green earth. Then we go to get ourselves all hot and huffy inside about keepin that up but, persunly, when I'm a thing at any time I oftener than not amn't certain about that'n neither, I just happen to be it.

Well, there must be something which maintains.

I spose. Sometimes it feels like the very ground is just as fickle, playin games of its own boredom. And times I think He Hisself has plumb nodded off, or caught sight of a pretty little thing along whatever road He's on and is swervin like a drunkard crosst the lines to crane his neck, wishin he wasn't so scare't to have followed his heart and done pulled the heck over for once.

Us idling here, ajar and forgotten; Yes, I believe he hath gathered the guts.

Well.

You've got to wonder about the gal who finally compels such a thing. What kind of divine rank entailed.

Well they's always been a mystry to myself. Evry rank of em.

Certainly am glad they're around, though.

Yessir. The plain sight of a good'n can just about make it all okay, I don't mind which summbitch you got to hollerin limpdick blues.

An order so wonderful and corrupted ought to make men reckon their lowness... Coffee?

Thank ye no. Makes my heart turn stupid.

I didn't know you had a part that wasn't.

Just happy as all I got one you shiteater.

Well. That's you.

Suttree

Suttree is not the thing, the creature in itself, with which it is concerned - that endured beast has name not. This work is instead profusely and meticulously lambent across the creature's weathered surface, inferring its shape softly adumbrated of some fog gripped within our hot, perishable latticeworkings. McCarthy's words being small motions upon this material I am not priveliged to know yet which is our secret cargo and manufactured purpose - me being some foolish husk - and his words seeking to craft an architecture of it, gently fingering strange and trembling convolutions, carving out a notion in which the aforementioned original and shabby spirit to alight: hirsute and saucer-eyed owl, parasitic, paramount over this, our, forgotten layer of existence and lonely in it, paling with infinitude (closer, closer, closer to darkness though never becoming, not welcome), dimly throbbing and emanant; above all, lovely. This spirit which begets life not with charity but playfully, ignorantly and as new, pretty renditions of its centripetal melancholy; as passtimes of a unity and thus sharing in its loneliness ("...all souls are one and all souls lonely"). 

We are somber and flippant hand-shadows upon a murky wall, cast by a lone candle waning of absolute will and being its own and only audience to the horrifying breadth of these grotesque shows; our depths remain dark but by our own light, indeed being carved by it. And our salvation, though we are shackled, being this accidental secret and, I would wager, a necessary miracle. Untouched, invulnerable, rebellious.

Or at least the sheer inertia of McCarthy's prose, its mythic gravity, the beauty of this dwelling place to bring the universe to manifest a habitant. 

And doors, doors, doors; these halls do never end but rarely - and with relief - by how they find purchase in a heart's resolve to close upon itself. 

Get It

Morality is a Discussion of Good Aesthetic Patterns

And they change.

Likewise, Jazz is a manifestation of pure morality. It is total focus on what is the good action unto the particulars of an existence. It tells us that we are welcome to - and indeed, should - pursue every motion, that we are not necessarily barred from anything, that we are absolutely free in our efforts to achieve righteousness and as well The Highest shall be - hopes to be, ought to be - itself surprised by what that is.

WATCH:

Chris Potter Underground

And how ugly to think that any dogma should be absolute? What a terrible fate for Whomever's Watching. The only dictum I could willingly bind to any existence is that it ought to want for itself, however.

Krupa wants himself.

Lately, I've decided to try my hand at being occupationally "successful". It already suffocates me; I am doing well. I feel that our system renders personal aspiration as only a commitment to means manifested as rigid, physical patterns which you lose the ability to live but instead begin to live you. I am confused. "No" emanates so deeply from my guts - out everywhere but my mouth. 

No, I do not want to do this thing nor that thing. I do not want to pretend to want to do this thing. No, I do not need to do this thing to get that thing. Not now, not ever.

These horrific things called jobs.

There was a time when the earth paid us stipends just to be alive. Tree branches bowed to a kind height under their weight, rivers swelled with their flesh. This is what I feel in my guts, in my chest, in every interstice of my existence: that I ought to be paid just to be; that my only debt is the symbolic gesture of graceful acceptance, of an open hand, an open heart. A product of some shaded place's desire for easy, volitional love.

This way of being has been stolen.

Every atom that makes me shivers with anger/love, an impulse to fight.

Is it possible that of nothing

will become something?

First, from darkness, a gentle plea:

"Let there be light,"

and hence woke Light for a lonely preadamite;

O, how beautiful and well rested was she!

But - as awoken within all waking things -

began to unfurl the almond,

the buds and flowers nestled therein,

of entropy.


********

Space, outside ourselves, invades and ravishes things:

If you want to achieve the existence of a tree,

Invest it with inner space, this space

That has its being in you. Surround it with cumpulsions,

It knows no bounds, and only really becomes a tree

If it takes its place in the heart of your renunciation.

- Rilke

This record is an architecture.

Earthen Soundwares - Exquisite Ghost

Earthen Soundwares is the type of music people will tend to wrack their brains over - that is, complex and vaguely "vague". The type of music which may frustrate both those who need to utter "profundities" about the reasons for their taste and those who are bothered by what they perceive as being prompted to. Really what needs to be said about this music, same as any, is quite simple: I like it. I think you should give it a shot. The rest is in the realm of the music - i.e. fertile speechlessness - itself, the realm of music itself.

Still, I think people are well aided by an honest clarity of intention. This music, its means, may be complex, nuanced, but its goals are simple. Do not conflate the two. Jordan, Exquisite Ghost, is a valued friend of mine, intelligent, articulate, profuse with complex ideas and eager to engage the complexity. Yet he continually strikes me with his pragmatism, his ability to be concise and willingness to be moderate, modest. Despite the mystery, grandiosity, subtlety which pervades this wonderful record, he'll tell you that it's simply "mood" music. For "listening to while you browse facebook" (for example). I have been exposed to some extent the rigor, the sheer amount of effort behind its creation, yet E. Ghost is not deluded about its proper use and neither should you be. Just put it on. It's an architecture. There's a sense of pristine spaciousness - recalling FlyLo - which pervades these soundscapes, and you've but to fill them out with yourself, your daily activities, daydreams. Sometimes it's a ladder by which you serenely climb through Stumbleupon; perhaps while you're kneeling over your garden it's the soil in which you plant the spiritual facsimile of each flower, each careful movement of your hands; a shelving unit into which you gently place the thoughts flowing through your head over the course of the day. It's whatever. This music is beautiful as you put yourself in it. 

This isn't to belie the obvious meticulousness of the record, nor to imply that it's per se lacking in beauty, interesting moments, exhilirating musical objects - it's not. Only that I believe in the importance of nameless things, to which family these "soundwares" belong.

Whatever the case, don't sweat; put it on, feel it out, turn it up, turn it off, whatever. I think that's precisely what the music wants: whatever.

DOWNLOAD HERE
and check out

salientsounds.com

You are not only significant; you are significance.

I don't get this inane fucking meme, in all its variations. "Insignificant" to what? Is this conception of "insignificance" anything I can encompass? Perceive? Is the perception of significance per se 
something that we can even project?


You are utterly - and necessarily so - significant, whether among 1 galaxy or 100 billion.
Don't trust anyone who tells you otherwise.

The only thing you contain
which also contains you: mystery.
At the center of everything
is neither god nor one's self,
but a hollow place.
  
And perhaps a fire, Nameless,
of infinite vacillation: The Only Unwavering,
not impartial but universally partial,
by which all parties to convene.

Sacredness and Choice

Humans need sacredness to sustain themselves, purpose. What characteristic does all sacredness share? Separation, distance. Sacred things are things which we are allowed to have perspective on - again, perspective necessarily entailing distance, separation. Things which are come to be assimilated by humans, things whose distance, separation is destroyed come to be profane, a synonym of which is vulgar -> common -> shared, meaning human.

What is the thing which is always separate, distant? Mystery. Mystery is sacredness. All holy things across all religions share a mystery, the inhuman, the elevated; the apotheosized are the mysterized. You cannot know; to say that you could know is to commit a sacrilege, is a profanation. What is "God"? God is apparently a unity coupled with will. God is Mystery; Mystery is possibility. Not Hope, for hope is a burden. Mystery is space, freedom. Mystery is spiritual roominess.

Silence.

If necessary, we may call soul/spirit the imagination. Imagination is necessary for us to accommodate the world. Imagination is our answer to not being omniscient, our answer to being imperfect. Imagination is ultimate adaptability (rendering it physically is thus limiting). 

A world in which all things are able to be assimilated into oneself, a world without mystery, is the same as a world in which one cannot place oneself and rest, be protected. Mystery is the sturdiest of houses, a blanket, a pillow. We must place ourselves within something - that is what we seek, to be held. Mystery is the freedom to construct that home appropriately, particularly.

A panther in a cage, for example, is a profanation, the cages being appendages into which we assimilate their "form" (it is really the creation of a new, tragic form). A panther in a cage is also necessarily a destruction (the process of its creation is necessarily violent or deceitful), for a panther is defined by the separation, distance, it shares with humans. A panther, a real one, is defined by its wildness, or mystery. The consumption, containment, of these things is the destruction of why we had first sought them. We have entered a terrible habit of confusing the "thing" itself with the particular, sacred effects it has on us. Confusing the "thing" in focus with the circumstances of its nature, which is the greater thing, i.e. an experience.

For what is a "thing"? I see a goldfinch. The creature, biological machine is not The Thing I am loving in its entirety. The Thing is the biological machine performing its actions in its space and the mystery, i.e. the freedom, within which I am able to create a full perception of it - for perception is a necessarily, if latently, creative pursuit. A goldfinch is, literally, made by separation; taking awe in the act of flight is wrought through our inability to do it, the necessity of imagination to form a perception of it. The possibility for spiritual exuberance. I have then gotten The Whole Thing. To capture the bird is to remove a gear - the only gear which I may have the capacity to handle due to the physical limitations of my senses - from The Whole Thing - the bird and its context; the bird and everything else - and to thus send The Whole Thing sputtering to a halt, and to wonder why I have lost The Whole Thing, which was an experience in the architecture, or the space, of my soul - it needing space to encompass space.

Space is separation, distance. To remove my soul's separation is to remove space is to remove the ability for my soul to likewise encompass space; is to remove the space for my soul's boundaries to stretch out comfortably within. To remove separation is to more tightly bind the boundaries of my soul. It is like a pillar trying to assimilate all other aspects of the greater architecture and then wondering why it has lost its meaning. A roof assimilating its pillars and wondering the same; a floor assimilating its roof - the distance, separation is what defines them. Playing our role means making a concession to space, distance, and that is the architecture of the universe.

Silence.

And we should be careful - and you may think this a hard thing for me to say - to not be too physically creative, that is, to be environmentally creative (destructive, for to create physically is to destroy another possibility insofar as everything is unique - and many of our physical creations are organic/biotic dead-ends), because to be physically creative is to rout our environment of mystery. It is to replace the world with ourselves, our clumsy appendages. The concrete slabs, the stop signals are not mysterious. And of course there are vagaries, but a vagary in human design, more and more, is manifested as a lack of intention. Therefore these vagaries are dead, they cannot contain mystery, are merely unfortunate imperfection. (And this is where the importance of materials comes into play, for certain materials express a willful concession to uncontrol, a willful concession to mystery, to unseen intentions but intentions nonetheless.)

Humans need sacredness - paradoxically, maybe - to be free.

Okay. I'll be a part of this world.

Let's charge through this shit:

I suffer from a debilitating combination of qualities: good taste and pride. This is to say that I know what is good and I want to make it. I am proud of the taste, and loathe the pride. I would much prefer either knowing what is good while being creatively shameless or finding pride through easy satiability. 

So, of course, please forgive me that which I am unable to forgive myself: my work is not yet pareil with my desire!

Watch:

Writing this piece has been a difficult proposition, yet unavoidable. It's felt like some sort of wall which I must scale in order to proceed with any work whatsoever. Nay, a pit of quicksand. (Stay still, Nate. Remain calm.) 

I once thought that:

art is about finding new, beautiful, concise ways to invoke perspective on the shared forces which shape the necessary and impossibly numerable private experiences which we all have so that we may reconcile them on our own and thus hope to know one another before meeting one another, and we find comfort in that.

And, in thinking about the importance of writing (oh, it is so very important), I thought that its primary virtue lay in its ability to schematize notion. Which is to say that it both offers a map to organized thoughts as well as it organizes those which were previously vague. It is an emergent lesson for both the reader and the writer.

Indeed, writing a draft of the previous thoughts brought me to a further realization: art, writing (if we should distinguish the two) do not simply schematize an extant, notional structure, but are themselves architecture.  Art is a mud hut. A yellow window in a dark forest. It is someone building a home for the notions which had previously only wandered like nomads through their dreams and keeping stoked a flame in the fireplace to warm them and their family. Art accommodates: think of how many times you've heard someone say that the music they listen to at any given time is dependent upon their mood at that time and, invariably, they prefer for the music to represent it. In grieving, people do not listen to cheerful music as to manipulate themselves back to happiness; they listen to sympathetic music which houses their state, keeps it out of the rain. They place their grief within a larger grief. 

Art is not beautiful, of course not. You are beautiful in the presence of art, because your beauty, whatever its particular nature in those particular circumstances, is given a place. Art does not put something in you, it cherishes something already there. It points to these things, holds them, because they are pretty. It is a setting for the jewels of your being. This is what we seek, what we all seek: to be held for our prettiness. The notes of music, for example, placed like bricks in time and mortared with emotion, are a literal architecture. They carve out a space for us which is the only way for us to reconcile with our selves, for if those things have no home, in all ourselves, do those things belong? Because doubt and hope, opposite sides of one coin, are the pits of fixation. And if the world is always moving, staying put means losing your place.

I have spoken of beauty as "the only debt which the universe renders, which in its paying incurs more debt". And poets have long spoken of their poems as a method to get through personal crises, calling their poems a receptacle for their burdens. Perhaps we are building a home for these entities in which they may achieve independence, growth, a life of their own. One thing I've come to terms with over the past months: I am a mystic.

There is a man named Martín Prechtel who was raised in New Mexico and, through a serendipitous series of events, was trained as a Mayan Shaman in Guatemala, in which capacity he served for many years.

                

Prechtel interviewed and transcribed by Derrick Jensen, as found in Jensen's book Truths Among Us:

Shamans are sometimes considered healers or doctors, but really they are people who deal with the tears and holes we create in the net of life, the damage that we all cause in our search for survival...The question is: how do we respond to that destruction? If we respond as we do in modern culture, by ignoring the spiritual debt that we create just by living, then that debt will come back to bite us, hard. But there are other ways to respond. One is to try to repay that debt by giving gifts of beauty and praise to the sacred, to the invisible world that gives us life...The other world feeds this tangible world - the world that can feel pain, that can eat and drink, that can fail; the world that goes around in cycles; the world where we die. The other world is what makes this world work. And the way we help the other world continue is by feeding it with our beauty.

...The Mayans say that the other world sings us into being. We are its song. We're made of sound, and as the sound passes through the sieve between this world and the other world, it takes the shape of birds, grass, tables - all these things are made of sound. Human beings, with our own sounds, can feed the other world in return, to fatten those in the other world up, so they can continue to sing.

When you dream, you remember the other world, just as you did when you were a newborn baby. When you're awake, you're part of the dream of the other world. In the "waking" state, you are supposed to dedicate a certain amount of time to feeding the world you've come from. Similarly, when you die and leave this world and go on to the next, you're supposed to feed this present dream with what you do in that one. 

Dreaming is not about healing the person who's sleeping. It's about the person feeding the whole, remembering the other world, so that it can continue. The New Age falls pretty flat with the Mayans, because, to them, self-discovery is good only if it helps you to feed the whole.

...You have to give a gift to that which gives you life. It's an actual payment in kind. That's the spiritual economy of a village...Ideally, the gift should be something made by hand, which is the one thing humans have that spirits don't...Once the fire is hot enough, the knife maker must smelt the iron ore out of the rock. The part that's left over, which gets thrown away in Western culture, is the most holy part in shamanic rituals. What's left over represents the debt, the hollowness that's been carved out of the universe by human ingenuity, and so must be refilled with human ingenuity. A ritual gift equal to the amount that was removed from the other world has to be put back to make up for the wound caused to the divine...So, just to get the iron, the shaman has to pay for the ore, the fire, the wind, and so on - not in dollars and cents, but in ritual activity equal to what's been given. Then that iron must be made into steel, and the steel has to be hammered into the shape of a knife, sharpened, and tempered, and a handle must be put on it. There is a deity to be fed for each part of the procedure. When the knife is finished, it is called the "tooth of earth." It will cut wood, meat, and plants. But if the necessary sacrifices have been ignored in the name of rationalism, literalism, and human superiority, it will cut humans instead.

All of those ritual gifts make the knife enormously "expensive," and make the process quite involved and time-consuming. The need for ritual makes some things too spiritually expensive to bother with. That's why the Mayans didn't invent space shuttles or shopping malls or backhoes. They live as they do not because it's a romantic way to live - it's not; it's enormously hard - but because it works.

...Though capable of feeding all creation, the spirit is not an omnipotent force, as Christianity would have us believe, but a natural force of great subtlety. When its subtlety is trespassed on by the clumsiness of human greed and conceit, then both human and divine nature are violated and made into hungry, devouring things. We become food for this monster our spiritual amnesia has created. The monster is fed by wars, psychological depression, self-hate, and bad world-trade practices that export misery to other places.

We inflict violence upon each other as a way to replace what we steal from nature because we've forgotten the old deal that our ancestors signed so long ago...As individuals, we become depressed, because the beings of the other world take it out of our emotions. 

...Often, you'll hear that you have to honor your ancestors, but I believe it's much more complicated than that. Our ancestors weren't necessarily very smart. In many cases, they are the ones who left us with this mess. Some of them were great, but others had huge prejudices. If these ancestors are given their due, then you don't have to live out their prejudices in your own life. But if you don't give the ancestors something, if you simply say, "I'm descended from these people, but they don't affect me very much; I'm a unique individual," then you're cursed to spend your life either fighting your ancestors, or else riding the wave that they started. You'll have to do that long before you can be yourself and pursue what you believe is worth pursuing.

The Mayan way of dealing with this is to give the ancestors a place to live. You actually build houses for them - called "sleeping houses" - and put your ancestors in there. The houses are small, because the ancestors don't take up any space, but they do need a designated place*, just like anything else. Then you feed your ancestors with words and eloquence. We all have old, forgotten languages that our languages are descended from, and many of these languages are a great deal more ornate. But even with out current language, we still have the capacity to create strange, mysterious, poetic gifts to feed the ancestors, so that we won't become depressed by their ghosts devouring our everyday lives.

...[Once you've dealt with the ghosts] Then we have to talk about maintenance, which is far more important than corrective measures. This culture is based on fixing things, as opposed to maintaining them. But once we start to maintain instead of constantly fix, the problems that vex us will become much easier to solve. It will no longer be a matter of fixing something as we think of it today. Right now, fixing something means getting our way. It should mean asking: "What do I need to do here?"...If the modern world is to start maintaining things, it will have to redefine itself. A new culture will have to develop, in which neither humans and their inventions or God is at the center of the universe. What should be at the center is a hollow place, and empty place where both God and humans can sing and weep together.

...When I was a child, I spoke a Pueblo language called Keres, which doesn't have a verb "to be." It was basically a language of adjectives. One of the secrets of my ability to survive and thrive in [Guatemala] was that the [village] language, too, has no verb "to be." Tzutujil is a language of carrying and belonging, not a language of being. Without "to be," there's no sense that something is absolutely this or that. If two people argue, they're said to be "split," like firewood, but both sides are still of the same substance. Some of the rights and wrongs that nations have fought and died to defend or obtain are not even relevant concepts to traditional Tzutujil. This isn't because the Tzutujil are somehow too "primitive" to understand right and wrong, but because their lives aren't based on absolute states or permanence. Mayans believe nothing will last on its own. That's why their lives are oriented toward maintenance rather than creation...In a culture with the verb "to be," one is always concerned with identity. To determine who you are, you must also determine who you are not. In a culture based on belonging, however, you must bond with others. You are defined by where you stand and whom you stand with. The verb "to be" also reduces a language, taking away its adornment and beauty, making it more efficient. The verb "to be" is very efficient. It allows you to build things.

Rather than build things, Mayans cultivate a climate that allows for the possibility of their appearance**, as for a fruit or a vine...In the village, people used to build their houses out of traditional materials, using no iron or lumber or nails, but the houses were magnificent. Many were sewn together out of bark and fiber. Like the house of the body, the house that a person sleeps in must be very beautiful and sturdy, but not so sturdy that it won't fall apart after a while. If your house doesn't fall apart, then there will be no reason to renew it. And it is this renewability that makes something valuable. The maintenance gives it meaning.

The secret of village togetherness and happiness has always been the generosity of the people, but the key to that generosity is inefficiency and decay...Mayans don't wait for a crisis to occur; they make a crisis. Their spirituality is based on choreographed disasters - otherwise known as rituals - in which everyone has to work together to remake their clothing, or each other's houses, or the community, or the world. Everything has to be maintained because it was originally made so delicately that it eventually falls apart.

Upon reading this, I was struck by the similarities to something I had written about 4 years ago. At the time, I didn't understand why I was writing the things I did, just that I enjoyed them and that they were vaguely honest; they were the schematics to some honesty. Or they were home for an honesty and so, just as our homes are maps to ourselves, they were the map to an honesty. And, of course, honesty is truth and therefore they were a schematic of truth.

A soft breeze shepherds leaves across pavement to where they pile aloft cemented corners and rattle with discontent. Some ghost is between them like a pillow, incubating thoughts simple and ancient beyond any language. 

In my passing it uncoils and whips forth like strange magnetism, scuttling sideways a leaf-legged millipede, slow and desperate to perform, until erupting prematurely across a blade of wind, to sleep again for perhaps the life of this universe--sometime maybe after the millionth rotation of existence to wake as myself: spongy skin flinching under my mother's teardrops; flushed cheeks and wet eyes reflecting each other in every one. 

"Sometimes I look at myself and I don't know who I am" I'll say, years later--or have said or am saying. 

"Sometimes I look at you and think you're me" she'll reply. 

"Where does that leave me?" 

"Lost and safe" she smiles. 

For if everything must happen then so must its replicant and so everything is a single point at one moment and it never will end but is a debt that must be paid and in its paying incurs more debt and is soft and beautiful and perfect for there are no free lunches unless all lunches and an eternity of them and so existence must always reach back to extend our history and forward to extend our future relentlessly and endlessly until maybe a chance circle is formed and everything can finally collapse to the perfection of nothing which is all it wants but will never have because the fire will approach its extinguishment only as time will slow proportionally. 

And so I emerge from shadow and my goose-pimpled skin begins to soften again--the building watching over quietly, already forgetting its encounter with this odd bedouin.

...Heavens to Besty, I'm rambling again. I can't help it, for my cup runneth over - or my butt, to some of you. I haven't even touched on the issue, the argument which started me writing. I'll bring this back 'round the next time I sit down.

For now, two nice pictures to get that awful taste out of your mouth:

A space:

And a place:

And finally, with a clean palate, someone who said it all better:

William Goyen, House of Breath

Don't be a stranger, now...

*See Yi-Fu Tuan's Space and Place

**Jazzy!