Year Two

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

Acts:  Second Year

Many initiates may desire to leave the program at this point and not complete any more Exercises.  This is so not only because the pursuit of positive excess is more tiring than most people think, but also because of what follows in the second year.  Yet, for the initiate to know the body, she must know it in all its primary manifestations and moods.  As we will not tire of saying, the path of the artist is a hard one, and the popular perception of the artist’s life as desirable is equal only to the ignorance that sustains the perception.

So in the first year the initiate explored the body’s positive excess through comfort, food, sex and image.  In this second year, the initiate will explore the body’s negative excess.  This exploration will be particularly painful, at least at first, because it follows a year of excess, during which the body has known no discipline, but only indulgence.

Yet the initiate must know the pain of the body if she is to fully know the body.  As we have discussed, some pain¾perhaps even substantial pain¾was experienced in the pursuit of pleasure in the first year.  Likewise, but in reverse, some pleasure will be found in this second year as the initiate pursues pain.  So in all things opposites are found.  The initiate should reflect on this, for it is a truth central to great art, and all great spirits know it as you know lunch.

Those who leave the program after the first year are welcome to.  We never wish to possess initiates; they need to stay always from their desire to stay and not from external pressures, whether these be a part of the program (though there be no program administration), family, friends, or society at large.  Those who wish to leave at this point because they have found the pleasures of the first year so enticing should leave and continue to devote their lives to positive excess; they are obviously devotees of certain things, but not devotees of art.  The artist who primarily pursues pleasure is never the best artist, even as the artist who primarily pursues suffering is never the best artist:  the pursuit of only one dimension of the human soul will always limit the resultant art.  Even so, if one had to choose pleasure or suffering, the artist should choose the latter, for in her art she attempts to redeem the human soul in words, images or sounds, but what is there to redeem in pleasure?  Art transforms blood and tears into beauty.  Art must be compassionate toward the human soul, and the pursuer of pleasure has no time for compassion¾he is too busy trying to possess, and possession and compassion are opposites.  Fortunately, however, the artist does not have to choose pleasure or suffering, for in knowing the totality of the human soul, she will inevitably know both from within both:  pleasure and suffering from within pleasure, suffering and pleasure from within suffering.

Thus this second year plunges the initiate into the suffering of the body and in doing so she performs penance for the pleasures of her first year.  We say this second year of suffering is penance not because we believe in penance for its own sake or because pleasure is wrong and must be atoned for, but because there is a principle rooted in the earth that every action requires its opposite, even as every thought does.  This principle is not necessarily causally enacted in the life of one individual, although it may be, but works itself out often below human sight. 

So each extreme is balanced by its opposite; it is true that occasionally an individual may be able to maintain what is considered by the average person to be a desirable life¾that is, a life full of pleasure:  full of comforts, sensuous and sexual fulfillment, and extensive image coverage¾but inevitably this person does so at the cost (either presently or historically, for the person may have inherited this life) of the suffering or complicity of others.  But the artist aims to mirror the human soul and thus requires intimacy with its totality within; by internalizing only certain aspects of the soul and externalizing others¾the goal of average people and the goal of those people who are called “great” by the average, but only because the “great” have obtained what the average dream of in their measured cubic dreams¾the artist narrows herself for personal gain and the artist who primarily pursues personal gain is a pursuer of pleasure not art.

In this second year, the initiate explores negative excess¾the suffering of the body.  As we discussed, there are ages that condone or even admire intentional suffering, while others scorn it; the initiate should be aware of which age she lives in and take necessary precautions¾not by fundamentally adapting her behavior, but by, in the former instance at least, ensuring that she is not admired for her behavior, which would in fact contravene the image objectives in this year.  For it is true that in an age that emphasizes martyrdom and de-emphasizes fame, the initiate faces a double challenge:  during the first year, she will be scorned for pursuing image, which is the opposite of what should be achieved, and during the second year she will be praised for pursuing suffering, which is likewise the opposite of what should be achieved.  The initiate in such instances will have to be creative to avoid such circumstances.  The opposite cultural situation is more amenable to the goals of these Exercises in these first two years:  during the first year the initiate will be praised for pursuing image, which coincides with her goals, and in the second year the initiate will be scorned or ignored for pursuing suffering, which enhances her suffering.  Fortunately, the latter situation is more common than the former, and even when the former situation exists, there is a certain hypocrisy embedded in it which the initiate can exploit.

Let us then explore the objectives in this second year of suffering, using the same four-part division as we did during the first year of pleasure.  With some thought and imagination, of course, the initiate would know what to do in this second year, as the actions required are simply the opposite of the previously specified actions.  Yet, even so, she may be tempted to soften the tasks of this year, human nature being what it is, thus we have outlined the directives for this year of suffering to ensure rigor and balance¾that is, that the sufferings pursued are equal to the pleasures pursued and that both are recognizably on the circumference, the outer reaches, of human possibility.  For if the artist does not reach for the limits of the possible, which seem like the impossible, her art may be competent, but it will be forgettable.

Comforts

For this second year the initiate should be homeless, regardless of the climate she inhabits, and live as the homeless live.  Sufficient clothes and bedding should be obtained through the usual means to reduce the likelihood of death, but nothing more.  In short, rather than having one’s person extended through as many enviable fashions, homes, furnishings and support as possible, the initiate here attempts to minimize extensions, reducing herself as much as possible to only her own body and nothing else.  This is commonly not only a situation that people do not envy, but they ignore.  The average person does not see the homeless person as a real, existing human; in this year, the initiate becomes invisible.

The initiate should keep in mind, however, that the average person needs equally both the homeless person and the rich and famous:  the former to despise and pity; the latter to envy.  In including these opposite emotions, the average person is able to include in herself an intimation of the extremes, without incurring the cost through living these particular emotions themselves.  The two extremes balance each other, provide a totality of existence and grant the great average mob vicarious pleasures and sufferings.  But in the third year, the initiate will explore being average, which, for the artist, may be the greatest challenge of all.

Yet, this being the beginning of the second year, the onset of the average is still some time off.  Indeed, being without comfortable extensions is not the only pursuit here, for the initiate must take upon herself the guilt and weight of the world, even as she in her first year took upon herself its delights and decadence.  For the earth is generous and cruel, and this is the year of cruelty.  What is the world guilty of?  What is its weight?  Some have written eloquently of our guilt¾for it is human guilt we speak when we speak of “world”¾in a way that finds no origins, but only recognizes its existence.  Such a way may be most truthful, for the quest for origins seems to meet a need in us to pursue what we cannot know, and thus, when that quest is represented as fulfilled, it misrepresents ignorance as knowledge and raises hopes that cannot be met by fabricating memories.  But the artist, while never foregoing her intense feelings of hope and origin, resists the temptation to turn these feelings into artifacts, into monuments.  It is not the artist who needs to dam the ever-changing river of feeling, but the pedant, the merchant, the insecure, the greedy.  The artist, if she is pedantic, is only so ironically; if she is concerned about money, it is only so that she can survive and thus have longer to create; if she is insecure, it is only because her insecurity is her security; if she is greedy, it is only for creation, solitude and love.  The artist knows the mandala of feelings, and knows this form cannot be reduced.  So life cannot be reduced to or fixed on hopes or origins, and so the guilt of which we speak is ours, though we don’t know from whence it came.

As the artist must accept the world in equal manner to herself, so she must accept her guilt.  This is the year of her guilt; while we call the carrying of this guilt “penance,” we do not mean by penance that her suffering will atone or redeem for anything¾whether these things be her self, her actions, words or thoughts; the actions, words or thoughts of others; or the soul of anyone; or the world.  Rather, the one purpose this penance has, if we can speak of any purpose other than creation, is to give the initiate’s body knowledge of human guilt.  Knowledge is not knowledge unless it is known in the body, unless the body has felt it, and felt it deeply.  To feel suffering, as even the persistently privileged do, from time to time, is insufficient; one must have been to the hell of the body and stayed there until one was on the cusp of immolation.  This, then, is the year of hell.

The year of the knowledge of hell begins with and stays in the body.  Let the initiate descend, even as she has ascended; but let her also attempt to survive.

It is insufficient, then, to strip herself of comforts¾a diminishment, as it were¾the initiate must also take upon herself active sufferings.  Some of these naturally follow in the subsequent sections¾food, sex, image¾but some belong in the current section.

In addition to homelessness and the absence of possessions, the initiate should actively engage in the following activities.  Recommendations for frequency and degree are also suggested.

The initiate should harm her body, taking care not to go beyond the point at which she will cause permanent damage.

She should scourge her body with all manner of harmful instruments.  We suggest, for example, a whip with the following attached to its sting, not typically at the same time, but either singularly or in small combination, both for practical convenience and variety:  nails, glass, wire, ceramics, scissors ends, incisor teeth, various tips moderately poisoned, items on fire.  Since self-scourging is awkward and less effective than other-scourging, the initiate should engage the services of one without scruples of mercy to carry out these particular acts of negative excess.   While mercy should not be a noticeable aspect of the scourger’s character, which would naturally prevent these Exercises from being practiced as required, sadism also should not motivate the scourger, for then he would take too much delight in the acts, potentially complicating them.  In short, the scourger should be fairly compliant and vacant¾to allow participation in what would be to most a repulsive act¾and not given to any extreme, to prevent unnecessary and difficult complications in the process.

Frequency should begin at approximately every week, and should be reduced so that by the end of no later than the end of the second month, the scourgings should be daily.  For those who can tolerate more, let them.  The number of lashes should also begin at a moderate amount¾ten, for example¾and increase according to the capability of the initiate.

If the initiate becomes too damaged in body, she should break temporarily with the scourgings, but only for as long as she requires to recover the strength to receive them again.

The initiate should be chained with mobility on a regular basis.  By this we mean that she should attach to her body, her waist for example, a rope or chain, which has attached to it a weight which permits mobility, though not mobility with ease but with some pain¾a largish rock, for example.  She should go about her normal activities, but with the tether and weight attached at all times.  The rock is the weight of our finitude and the tether is the inescapability of our condition.  By regular, we mean between 15% and 25% of each month, including sleep.

In addition to such confinement, the initiate should also be chained without mobility; this can be accomplished in various ways:  imprisoned in a small cell (measuring no more than 6’ x 4’ x 6’) without release during the duration of such confinement, being tied to a tree or rock or other immovable edifice.  The latter is preferable due to its greater physical restrictions.  Such confinement should also be regular, occurring monthly for three to five consecutive days.  This exercise is useful in embodying human entrapment.  While such extreme entrapment is not our normal condition, neither is it abnormal; almost all experience radical confinement sometimes and many are born into it for a lifetime.  We speak not simply of physical confinement, but of all sorts:  emotional, metaphysical, spiritual, psychic, existential, intellectual, ontological, demonic.  We are chained by our dreams and our bodies, even as we are freed by them.

Considering that, combining the mobile and immobile confinement exercises, the initiate will only be spending approximately 3% of the total time devoted to the Exercises confined, we do not accept objections to these acts as valid.  By these acts, the initiate identifies herself with a deep, abiding aspect of the human condition; she brings it within herself; she traces its external reality on the foundation of her soul with the instrument of her body, bringing it alive.  And alive it must be to create.  Suffering, ecstatic, it must be.

Finally, in the area of comforts in this phase of negative excess, the initiate should subject herself to sensual deprivation, depriving herself of light, sound, smell, taste and, to the extent possible, touch.  She should stay fully in this state for three to five days each month.  In this way she is immersed in the void of non-being, and she will know a certain face of madness and truth.

The initiate should also allow herself to bathe minimally¾not at all if possible.  She should sleep outside and only keep to herself whatever coverings are necessary for the climate she lives in.  She will thereby come close to the earth, and feel what it is like to be close to the earth, although she lives in technology’s womb.  Let her reflect on her embodiment of the earth in a foreign environment; the tension inherent in this relationship is critical for a mature aesthetic perspective.

The initiate may combine various acts, so long as she does not diminish any in the combination¾acts either in this comfort section with themselves or with acts in subsequent sections, ensuring that acts from other phases do not intrude; so, for example, she may combine immobile confinement with sensual deprivation, sensual deprivation with various food acts, mobile confinement with various sex acts.  Indeed, some combination will be inevitable, as will be soon seen.

This exclusion of combinations may raise objections of a falsity inherent in these Exercises¾a falsity to which we fully agree!  For this falsity is artifice and artifice is art.  Let the reader write his own Exercises if he wishes.  Let him mirror the world according to his knowledge.  Will he be more comprehensive than our Exercises?  Will he be so bold?  Let him try.  If he is inspired by all the gods to their utmost power, he may succeed; if not, he will fail and produce yet another tepid forgettable work.

The reader may object that such behavior as we have outlined is masochistic and unhealthy, and we will agree with the reader and certainly recommend that the person not striving to be an artist or who is not an artist not attempt these Exercises.  But just as the businessperson must train himself in finance and marketing, and the designer must train herself in proportion and style, so the artist has a world¾but the artist’s world is not a specific world, but the world:  the world of the soul which gives birth to worlds.  So the artist must train herself in the world.  But there is no school or discipline¾and cannot be¾that trains her.  Her school is life:  her immersion in life, the world’s response to her and her response to the world.

Now if the artist leave her training to chance, she may primarily experience ease or suffering, adoration or scorn, leaving her with a one-dimensional experience of the world.  These Exercises are designed to correct this natural imbalance, for art uses nature to transcend nature, and this combination¾this using and transcending¾is the ambivalence, duality, and tension of art, its necessary fuel.  So the artist in her training exposes herself to the multi-dimensional world, to relieve her of easy notions of power, morality, justice, love, privilege.  Now the artist, who by natural means, gains such exposure, is less likely to experience the breadth and depth these Exercises are designed to inculcate.  Nature will select certain paths, rejecting others; these Exercises, through careful observation of and experience in the world, accept all the major paths and ensure that the initiate walks on each.  So the artist polishes her mirror; so she reflects the world.

Before we proceed to the next section, we need to briefly discuss a benefit of these deprivations, a benefit which also applies to the entirety of these negative excesses; namely, the benefit of visions.  For it is a curiosity of human experience that when the body is subject to positive excess, visions are rare (other than when using hallucinogenics, the very purpose of which is to compel visions), the need for visions being diminished due to the pleasant externalities meeting one’s eyes:  flesh and food.  But as flesh is scourged and pummeled, when food is poor and scarce, the human frequently rips the veil between physicality and dream and phantoms become friends and fiends neighbors.  Such images are valuable building blocks in the emerging artist’s imagination.

Food

The initiate should live as the homeless live, depending on the whims and generosity of others, the luck of life, and the cunning of the one without a home. 

The initiate should live on the streets and beg for her food; if she has special skills, such as song, she should not demonstrate these, but rather appear to be as nothing.  She should live off the proceeds of the gifts made to her and, if this should prove insufficient, she should visit any available shelters or food banks that cater to the homeless.  In this way, she will likely maintain a diet largely of caffeine, donuts and alcohol.

In addition to following the standard practices of the homeless in relation to food, the initiate should deprive herself further, as she not only is learning a specific practice but is attempting to embody a portion of the soul.  She thus is privileged to explore further the kingdom of suffering, whose foundation is the body, from which all further pain is born.  Hence, she should, one week a month, fast, ingesting only water.

Sex

The initiate shall engage in no touch with another human being during this year.  Neither shall she touch herself, except for basic acts of bathing, feeding or drinking.  As the artist must be a highly sensual person to be an artist of any worth, this deprivation will feel severe; coupled with its conjunction with the previous year of debauchery, it will feel unbearable.  The initiate should pass through the unbearableness, rather than trying to resolve it; only in this way shall she know negative excess.  The moment she tries to resolve it, she will be living according to the practice of either the first year¾of positive excess¾or the third year¾of the average.  All weight, all loss, must be born this year, even if permanent damage or death results; only those who bear to the end shall create and should some fall along the way, this tragedy, and the risk and randomness contained in it, illustrate the chance and extraordinariness of survival.  Let all¾those who survive, those who do not, and those who never make the attempt¾reflect on this process, for while it illustrates a core aspect of aesthetic creation, it also illustrates a core aspect of all creation, and so all of life.

Image

The initiate should live this year in continually self-enforced isolation from society.  Such isolation does not mean that no human contact should take place, although whatever does take place should be minimal, but means that what is considered most valuable according to society¾reputation, name, connections¾are both non-existent and non-pursued.  By the latter we mean that the initiate should make no attempt to construct them; by the former we mean that even if, by whatever means, they are presented to her, she shall refuse them.  In not pursuing and refusing, she should thereby feel abject loss:  both externally, in how the world pities, ignores and scorns her; and internally, in that she will feel the bottomlessness below all surfaces, and this feeling will feel as death.  Whereas in the first year, the initiate felt the exploding exuberance of all surfaces, this year she explores their imploding nothingness; she should reflect on the strange union of these two directions, and her privilege of being able to fully experience both.  But we shall return to this theme in a new way in the third phase.