Year Ten

Aesthetic Exercises to Accept the Soul and Mirror the Soul of the World

Presuppositions

Every human has a soul, and the soul is made of fire.  The fire in each individual mirrors the fire of the world and so the world is contained in each person and each person in the world. 

Even as fire manifests itself in respect, reverie, descent, wantonness and deception, so it manifests itself in the opposite of each:  apathy, mundaneness, ascent, purity and clarity; at the core of fire, and so at the core of the soul, are repetition, transformation and contradiction.

The soul is a factory:  its fuel is the darkness of fire, its output is light.  The responsibility of the artist and the person, each living in their respective worlds, is to transform darkness to light.  Since the world can only show light, dark by its definition being incapable of being shown, light is all we see and thus the reader may object that everyone fulfills his responsibility, no dark being shown.  But in each soul is an equal amount of darkness, forged as it is from the same fire, although due to many seemingly random factors, each person does not have equal access to the darkness.  We know that light varies from person to person; this may be, to continue our analogy, because everyone transforms all their available darkness to light but, as we have just argued, available darkness is not distributed equally, or because some souls are more efficient instruments of transformation.

It is also important to distinguish the light which people simply copy from other light, and light that is transformed directly from darkness.  The bulk of the light we see is the former, as people hold their souls as mirrors to the light they see in others; the reader should not assume that this is false light¾all light is light and comes through whatever path from the same dark origin.  However, light is diffused the more it is refracted.  It is very rare that a person depends wholly on the darkness for her light.  When you peer into a person’s soul, if you have such a gift, a rare gift in itself, you see many varieties of distance from darkness.  So, as you peer, not with hope to see or as a charlatan, but prescribed as one to see, receptive, as a child, shades of copied light will impress themselves on the soul of the one who peers.  Many are those whose light is such¾copied endlessly, diffused¾that they no longer have even intimations that light is born from darkness.  As one draws closer to fire’s darkness and its efficient and entire transformation, so the number of people in the more restricted orbit is, naturally, fewer.  Be wary of those who claim to be such ones as those who live in the space of which we speak; the one who knows darkness hints and points and never speaks directly; darkness hides, as it must, being darkness.

Such people, who depend wholly on darkness for their light, are never what are normally called good; rather, they define the good.  Normally, the good are called those who have thrown water on their fire.  Many hundred million human forms will rise and fall and never directly encounter such a one; we have, perhaps in some cases, their words or sounds or colours, and so we can reach through a troubled veil and sense a fire we will never see.  In some cases, we only have intimations of their presence, their never having left a record of their transformations.

Such a person as we describe is the purest artist and such people are to be feared.  It is this purity that is the objective of these Exercises, although we acknowledge that no amount of training, no weight of suffering, no persistency of time, can produce what we aim for.  All such artists of whom we speak are driven into existence by a spark of divine terror¾polished, unnamed, immeasurable¾and flare onto the earth, impossible, unalloyed, absolute, pressed into human form, amoral, a totality of fire.

The initiate should ponder this process, the embedded doubt, and the root futility of the will in all creation.  Creation is not ours to claim, but to receive.  We are receivers and transmitters of forms; we reform the forms, reflect the light, transform darkness, and this is what we do.

The nature of pure artists is not simply what we normally name as artists.  (We have already dispelled the notion that such artists are pure according to societal definitions; such definitions are definitions of refracted light and not of darkness, and only definitions of darkness¾vague, ambiguous, unclear¾are worthy to define:  that is, draw outlines, creating light.)  We repeat:  the purest artist is she who wholly depends on darkness for her light; the materials with which she works, the forms she creates, the imprint she leaves behind, are all immaterial.  If one lives but for 20 years and depends wholly on darkness for her light to live, she is pure, though she never be known.  And she is purer than the greatest name, if that name was alloyed in its making.

Every human has a soul, hidden, muted or mutant though it might be.

The human soul is oriented toward the impossible, always craving what does not exist; this craving can be oriented toward what does not exist in one’s live but exists elsewhere, tangibly, in the world, having substance and overlapping in time, or this craving can be oriented toward what does not exist in one’s live and has existed elsewhere, tangibly, in the world, having substance, but not overlapping in time, or this craving can be oriented toward what does not exist in one’s live and has not existed elsewhere, but might exist in future time, or this craving can be oriented toward what does not exist in one’s live and has never existed and cannot exist.  Inevitably, due to uncertainty being an innate characteristic of the future, the latter two categories cannot be effectively distinguished.  (God may be a function of the fourth category; if so, the maintenance of God in this necrotheoic age can be seen as an essential, thankless task to sustain and grow this aspect of the soul.  The believe and nurturing of what cannot exist is as essential to the health of the soul as the believe and nurturing of what can and does and has.)

So the soul’s fire reaches out in all four directions.  Some, the reader will note, are oriented in a particular direction; some directions are more common than others¾namely, the first.  So the common soul craves what he can grasp and devotes his life to grasping; in this way, he can show success; and, as success is commonly defined by such grasping, as the majority controls the common definitions, he is affirmed in his direction.

The soul is born to seek and be dissatisfied with all it finds, for all it finds it wants to be the calmer of the soul, and it is not.  There is no calmer of the soul.  The soul lives in calm, then storm, then calm, then in-between.  There is no object in the world, no conglomerate of objects, that can change this pelagic perturbation.  For what is there that can dam the sea?  For a moment, maybe, with things physic or divine, the sea will cease and obey.  But soon, it returns to its playful ways:  untrammeled, free.  The binding was but a blink, but because so rare, we tell many stories in its wake.

In the soul all states¾all sorrows, joys, deaths, births, betrayals, surprises, ecstasies, disappointments¾are.  We look for God in the soul and find God by not finding him.  We look for God to rescue us from certain states and to deliver us to others; he does not do this; he is silent.  In his non-action, in his silence, in this bedrock of the soul below the states we wish to be rescued from and delivered to, we find God.  This finding is a not-finding.  We say perhaps ah, this is all God is, the silence below everything.  But this silence is the everything below everything and the only awe that forces us to silence while we still are alive.  In this silent breathing, we combine life and death and so know the universe, the visible mirror of the soul.

The reader should be reminded that we speak of God neither as a substance nor as a definable reality, but as the experience that embraces all experience.  If the reader does not know this experience¾neither a feeling nor a deed, but a lived knowledge¾he is best to discard the word¾for so too this experience discards the word and we use it only with regret:  God, the wordless word. 

But God becomes an almost necessary word in matters of the soul; God is more a product of the soul than any other aspect of the person.  The body acknowledges nothing outside of flesh; the will acknowledges only itself; the mind disputes God; judgement is reserved.  But the soul, given over to itself, yearns, and what it yearns for is God.  The master of the soul knows God cannot be found and knows nothing other than the soul’s yearning for what cannot be found.  God’s presence is found in absence in the soul; elsewhere, God simply isn’t found.

To experience all the states of craving of the soul and know that they in their multifarious contradictoriness all are necessary parts of the soul is to know the soul.

The soul, with aid from the mind and will, will attempt to reduce the complexity of the soul to one or more aspects of the soul’s nature.  Lives can be lived this way.  So even civilizations.  But only those whose souls are already a portion of the soul will agree that the soul is such. Despite what the mind defines and the will constructs, the soul is not less than what it is; only definitions and constructions are less than, pointing to, the soul.

Meditations

Meditate on how one creates as pure a channel as possible between soul and word.

Meditate on how one most efficiently can use all the perpetual necessary dross of the world as input to the soul.

Meditate on how the human soul is unique among the world’s machines:  able to transform garbage into tools, yes¾even beauty!

Meditate on the soul’s tendency to harden itself against a truth of the soul, thereby confirming the truth.

Similarly, meditate on the soul’s ability to soften and even dissolve a truth of itself as it softens toward that truth and absorbs it.

Meditate on the relationship between language and soul, focusing on god as the linguistic container of the soul.

Meditate on the soul’s ability to relate relationships.

Meditate on the soul’s relationship to artifacts and to all things concrete.

Rationale

The soul, dark in its god-bowl, silenced under a carousing sky, sings in silence, lighting a flame which only those who too are silenced see.  Dark in its pristine oligarchic pride, subservient to all and nothing, it sings.

Why is it dark?  It has peered at the world and died, died to another life and world.  Only the soul is capable of resurrection.  The mind cannot believe; there is no evidence.  The will¾it strives to deny our fading.  The body lives and through its death is finally generous to the earth.  But the soul knows it is eternal and only changes form.  The soul, unlike the other aspects, does not protest the darkness, but is at home, building, breathing.  Because its habitat is darkness, so its products cannot be seen.

The soul sings and dies and breathes; empty, full, it lives.

Method

As before, we explore the soul through three years:  music, compassion and emptiness.  So the trajectory is from sound to silence and, as with the will and the mind, from action to non-action.

Tenth Year:  Music

The soul’s body is music; if we were just soul, there would just be sound.  The soul takes up its instruments of night and in a dark orchestral pit begins to fumble; but even this fumbling to the soul in the beginning sounds like what we imagine must have been God’s initial rapture, for the sound is light to the soul.  This revelry is unrivalled by the most sophisticated art, for origins are ecstasy and everything subsequent, though perhaps increasing in external beauty, inevitably decreases in internal bliss.  This is the cost of knowledge and art, and the initiate would do well to reflect on the price she has already begun to pay.

In art there are only four manifestations:  sound, image, movement, word.  What appear to be new forms, such as film, are simply combinations of old forms; film, being a technological and social form, integrates, even as language once did some millennia ago.  But language now has entered its disintegration stage, as everything must do, and those who create in word must span in their souls the cycle of language, from birth to death, and so have the unique opportunity to reflect the life of a form.  Those in film are full of ecstasy, being young, discovery still genuine.

The initiate, while not being a musician of any worth, should this year listen to the world’s preeminent music, exposing herself across the surface of sounds to absorb its breadth, but devoting herself to its complexity to absorb its depth.  As with religion, philosophy and literature, she should not study music¾it does not matter to the soul whether a passage is – or --; this only matters to the mind¾or attempt to understand it cognitively; she should absorb it, dance to it (although surely in the privacy of her apartment), become it.  She should map the sounds to the places in the soul they emerge from.