Thoughts @ 51

51 looks like a prime but isn’t, even as I look like a prime, but am not.

Cinema:

Tarkovsky as slow perfect beautiful as Tarr, without the omnipresent palpable despair.  Instead, omnipresent palpable emptiness.

Two of the great cinematic spiritual biographies:  Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates, Tarkovsky’s The Mirror.  Each shows a soul’s life visually, the facts—so omnipresent in modernity—subservient, almost absent.

Tarkovsky says that art requires imperfection.  But, there being no perfection, there is no imperfection and so no art.  Or else art does not require imperfection ... it feeds on its requirement for imperfection differently than it does its non-requirement.

On the Bain:

No individual loss, voice, is important, no one is missed for long because the one of the whole is palpably, authentically stronger than the inevitable eternal palpable authentic individual one.  The Bain confronts its members with the truth of the whole:  it forces a spiritual principle into incarnation, shoves god not into a named individual perfected body but a polynamed transnamed collective imperfect body—that which Jesus attempted but failed at.  It is thus not—it is thus no longer—a name above or edifice that is aimed at or arrived at, but a form below that is here.

The culture doesn’t need to be changed—the culture is here—it simply needs to be effectively and environmentally mined.  But the culture may be such as to be severely resistant to mining.

Feelings, Will, and Body:

Society is structured feeling.

The young require passion to express their feelings.  If one matures at all, the feelings become directly capable of expressing themselves without the presence of an intermediary—or, in other words, without one particular half of the emotional spectrum (passion, life) dominating.  That so many endure life devoted to passion—or its brother, bitterness—indicates a society given to the avoidance of death (that is, the body)—hence the ubiquity of the proclamation of the body inevitably a cultural indication of a desperate denial (also with freedom). Yet with death accepted, passion sits in balanced tension with it and the feelings are laid out on a level.  But the sentimental decadence of the age demands a spinning, without death to temper the passion of existence.  So one’s life becomes a fact in the way that that tree is a fact, or that love, that cat, that chair, that committee, that idea, that century, is a fact.  I am piled on the heap of time and regard myself in it.  What is it that regards me?  Death?  I say death regards me regarding it:  two mirrors—in some state of being polished—confronting each other in darkness (the confrontation being light).  The question shifts:  what does the polishing?  Could the answer be death also?  Death:  the active agent in life.

How can anyone reasonably defend the existence of the individual will?  Will, yes, but as anything but wholly and perpetually relational and collective?  Individuality will surely be looked upon by our descendants—should they exist—as blood-letting or slavery is by us.  Our modes, theories, structures, are all modelled on radically primitive notions of being.

My body is my spirit; i breathe—that is, i speak—my body.  My words are simply my particular body made articulate.  Who expects one’s body to be the same each day?  It is—that is, it feels—like a different body each day, each hour, so who expects one’s thoughts, theories, words, systems, motivations, attitudes, values to be the same?  Why would i use my mind to chain this energy?  Would i not rather use my mind simply as a tool in service of this energy?  To do so, however, requires an ongoing comfort with death—transience—for the mind, as it presents itself to the modern self, contains death as its core, but hidden.  The task of the modern mind is to dig through itself to death and so rediscover nature through the discovery of the body.  Society, however, avoids this primary task by erecting a simulacrum of the body and taking care of this simulacrum through prosthetic—technical—means, which is the only effective way to deal with simulacra if one would not have them disappear.

Art:

The artist, of course, has lost its relevance.  Art hasn’t and can never; the confusion between artist and art, between creator and creature, between spirit and flesh, has lead to the conclusion that art has lost its relevance.

Art is not the spirit of commerce, of transaction, of the particular relation between things, but of the relation of all things, the code that circumscribes transactions, that which gave birth to and subverted commerce by its very existence.  This is why art overwhelms and must overwhelm, why art is like god and is in a sense god’s replacement.  Not the art of names and labels, the art of volition and cocktails, the art of pedigree and list, but the art of the sum of all relational monads, the art of nature before it was named, the art of joyful madness and chaos and doom.  Art is spirit and we have entered the age of the holy spirit, of secularized sacred art—when art is no longer something separate and apart but the very molecular structure of existence.  Art is life, life is art, art annihilates itself in life, life in art, and in this annihilation is the authentic rebirth of the apocalypse:   no destruction of the earth, of flesh, and its beauty, but the complete eradication of all structures of the soul and its bastard child, mind, so that soul appears—or reappears—in its original and transformed state:  empty, free, glorious, transfigured.  In such a way art laughs at money, fame, career, and stares at itself as itself:  a series of infinite polished mirrors of unparalleled flawed beauty and perfection:  reflection of reflections and end of origins.  Only in this way is art released from itself to be itself, does it enter into the birth of its fate.

Art is, simply, the inversion of the spirit of nature, whereby nature overcomes itself through its excess.  This larger framework is what the moralists perpetually overlook.  Art was never meant to be what it has become, but only what it is becoming and will never be except in its becoming.  Art is reflection, without an end—which is to say with no goal, finality, definition (beyond the space of the moment) and—truly—no reflection in its reflection.  Reflections reflecting not themselves in themselves but the totality of all reflections reflecting not themselves in themselves and themselves.  It is the “and themselves” that creates the requirement for ethics and the present circumscriptions of art. The role of the “and themselves” is perhaps the critical evolutionary question of the next few millennia. 

A Muted Apology for April Irregularities

The Secular Sadoo would like to apologize to those disturbed by such things for the lack of chrono-synchronicity between the proper dates of some of the Proper postings in April and the posted dates of some of the Proper postings in April; this lack some may consider to have been and even to be improper.  Although considering that the only two Propers (thus far) that have been affected have been The Malfeasance of Lesser Saints (which isn't technically a Proper) and the Proper of two mystics--the latter who surely can't care much about time as far as we're concerned and the former whom we surely care about but possibly not to the extent of caring about synchronicity--not much really has been lost.

We have attempted to return today to regular programming with The Bard Himself.  Praise be.  Our only excuse is that in a life and a world not governed by regularity, this April has been, if possible, even more irregular than most Aprils.  Mr. Eliot might chuckle.  But, then again, he might not.

2:0 - the world of 2 (3)

2 is strife and tension—a war between life and death, love and hate.  This war, in the world of 2, has no resolution until death.  We build necessary walls to control the war.  We form families, get jobs, seek lovers.  We have houses, cars, routines.  But families change and break apart.  Jobs end.  Lovers leave or we leave them.  We get bored of houses and cars decay.  The same routines no longer meet our needs.  The more one runs away from this war, the more one lives a living death, becoming like a lifeless battery encased in a useless shell.  But make no mistake—the war is still there, now lurking like a spy, now erupting like a warrior.  The degree to which we deny it in ourselves is the degree to which we deny it in the world.

The more we build tangible structures around ourselves to shield us from the tensions in the world of 2, the more we sever ourselves from the very blood of our existence.  But, also, the more we live only according to the rules of this war, the more we accept 2 as the only reality and live as beasts divorced from a larger destiny.

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This war of 2 includes the struggle between subject and object — between myself (my needs, desires) and the world (other people, possessions, nature).  It also includes the struggle between myself and words, ideas and symbols.  The first is my struggle for survival and domination.  The second is my struggle for meaning.  For many, the first struggle is the second struggle.  In this case, I find meaning through my body (food, clothing, shelter, sex) and my domination over other people and things (status, possessions, security, sexual and relational conquests).

I experience myself as an utterly isolated individual in an ambiguous world.  To reduce my terror I try to append as many objects as possible to myself to add stability, continuity and security.  The more objects, the greater the odds that they will not all leave or collapse at once, ensuring a life which, while hardly trouble-free, at least has its major and minor catastrophes spread out in time.  This way of speaking is not a description of existence as it can be, should be or even is always lived.  It is only a description of a life lived solely from within the confines of the world of 2.  Today, however, the world of 2 dominates and many only live their lives, consciously or otherwise, building a wall of objects around themselves.

Friday Thoughts

Isn't the goal of a life to develop such a large mask wardrobe that if someone stumbles behind the doors, they’d never get to Narnia?  Life as being lost eternally in the mask wardrobe.  (Bergman as a cinematic master of this truth.)

Yoga, if it subjects itself to anything but itself (breath, spirit, animating, the natural action of air), becomes a practice of spiritual Botox.  Yet this is what we typically see:  morality, convention, artifacts, reputation, money competing with and dominating the breath--which in life is nimbleness.

In the old equation, one can only accept love into one’s life to the extent one accepts death—which is to say, in life, grief.  Grief as a magic carpet of being.

Human #1:  Are you a writer?

Human #2:  Let’s just say I have an unusually intimate relationship with creation.

The depths to which one accepts pain in oneself are the depths to which one accepts pain (and hence anger, mistrust, imperfection, love) in others, to which one accepts the world.  Much of technological society is constructed to stretch a kind of plastic wrap around this pain; but by mitigating pain in this way, we mitigate our acceptance of the world, others, and ourselves, and live increasingly in illusion.

My parents gave birth to me physically.

My children gave birth to me spiritually.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of migrating from heaven and hell to earth is the gear shift into a kind of oneiric first gear.  Earth is slow.  The benefit of having experience in heaven and hell is that one has learned to move quickly and is not surprised on the occasions when heaven and hell erupt on earth and rapid action is required.  Like animals who sense a tsunami before humans (who have derooted themselves from the rhythms of earth), so the one who’s been to heaven and hell and returned to earth can anticipate eruptions, feels the distant movement of clouds and rocks.  This is the task of the modern human:  to find nature in the city.  But the only place it can be found is deeply buried in the body.

Some lines from Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia:

Live between divine forgiveness and the torment of your soul.

We must listen to the useless voices.

You must stretch the corners of the soul like a sheet.

It’s the so-called healthy who have brought the world to ruin.

God governance.  We develop our own principles, often unconsciously or paraconsciously, for recognizing the divine in ourselves and in others, for managing awe (and so overwhelment) and thus keeping the divine in perpetual check.  (The cosmic chess game never ends.)  When doing this with a degree of consciousness, humans can begin damming the divine, begin using it for certain purposes.  (Our bodies are spiritual steam engines which we’ve only just begun to understand and exploit.)  In short, god is now simply another technology.  (Will we, some centuries hence, if we survive in any meaningful sense, struggle with the same problems of excess in the divine realm as we do now in the realm of nature?  Too many dams.  Ecotheology problems?  Or is the divine, being infinite by nature, not subject to such abuses, and is that the key?)

2:0 - the world of 2 (2)

Let’s list dualities, not from some solid space, from the pinnacle or interior of some obelisk, but rather as if we’re collecting them—like the seeds of dandelions—from the gaseous swirl above the foggy meadow of history.   (Perhaps to place in some future metaphysical museum.)  Do they point to certain elements that circumscribe experiences?  What kind of words are they?  Is such a list simply crass and juvenescent?  Do these primal words—these big and scary words—neither exist in isolation from our experience nor are more real than our experience?  Such lists may be play, but is not authentic play related to the real, a deep and particular articulation of the real?

good – evil (day – night, white – black, light – dark) (love – hate, justice – injustice)	male – female	seen – unseen (visible world – invisible world; sense – imagination)
transcendence – immanence (heaven – earth, earth – hell, heaven – hell)	creator – creature (parent – child, god – humanity, humanity – technology, humanity – art)	freedom – necessity (choice – fate, free-will – determinism)
body – mind (life – knowledge)	life – death (being – non-being)	nature – technology (human – machine)
master – slave (ruler – ruled, sadist – masochist, tyrant – victim)	eternity – time (infinity – space)	subject – object (I – It)
desire – acceptance (action – non-action)	truth – falsity	specific – general (one – many)

[

Thinking about God has historically been at home in the world of 2.  One of language’s core past functions may have been to help us cope in this world, which seems so liminal and real simultaneously.  Yet with the breakdown of Word, the partial transference of the divine functions to language, the birthing of the plurality of words and languages, the irreducible contradictoriness of existence, thinking about God must also change.  It must accept 2 and yet expand, leaving the supremacy of 2 (and so duality, myth, binary constructs) behind.  How does this happen?  It happens by grounding thinking in 2:0 as a diverse whole—in short, by rooting thinking in the body. 

2:0 - the world of 2 (1)

We conceptualize the world through opposites or dualities.  Our senses detect differences and we starkly name them.  We say male and female, night and day.  We crave hot and cold.  We hear hate and love, taste and smell bitter, sweet.

Our minds seek meaning in our movement in the world.  We say, “This is good, that is bad; this is true, that is false.”  We are forever categorizing and analyzing—endlessly dividing things in two.  To live is to separate and to join.

We experience and name degrees between the vague and stern extremes.  There is dusk, a partial eclipse, a crescent moon.  We have a lukewarm bath, walk out into a temperate spring day, place a bittersweet morsel on our tongues.  Some blur gender distinctions through dress and biology.  Something is a half-lie, a dubious action, imperfectly good.

But it is the dualities, not the grey, which we use to circumnavigate our limits, as a primal and impossible comparison for the murkiness we live within.  The dualities are a foundation of language and the portal to the world of 2.  We are able to say grey because we have perceived black and white.  We sense the ambiguity of truth because we concoct notions of good and evil, even after we have said we have moved beyond them.  We feel contradictory and confused because we have known, even if but somewhere within our souls (and does not this place of knowing seem so real to some of us that other places sometimes fade?), the extremes of passion.  While our lives are lived in the muddled indefinability of everyday existence, it is the dualities themselves that wrap the foil of dream around us and stab our empty centers.

[

Over the past few centuries, with increasing vigor and clarity, the reality of the dualities has been questioned.  What is male?  What is female?  What is good?  What is evil?  What is truth?  What is falsehood?  Everything essential and objective has been made value-laden and subjective.  Many are lost without the appearance of such firmness.  Traditionalists grasp at the familiar patterns from the past.  Materialists and hedonists ignore the question through possessions and pleasure.  The avant-garde in philosophy, art and education say such questions are no longer relevant—we now know that definitions are a matter of utility; they serve the interests of a given age and are the collective creations of that society and the internal struggle of its members.

But the familiar has been fading and those who choose past patterns live in dangerous cloisters.  The quest for possessions and pleasure knows no limits and, without limits, we endanger the earth and ourselves.  A radical focus on the social and political context of values is a pendulum swing away from the past radical focus on an objective, God-given creation.  Such pendulum swings are normal historical correctives, but should not be taken as normative themselves.

The world may not have been as objective as the past perceived it.  But it also may not be as subjective as the present perceives it.  The dualities are needed, not because they have a solidity which provides us with an unalterable security, but because we cannot live life without reference to them, even if such reference can be cloaked in caprice.  The dualities lurk in the wispy circumferences of our dialogue.  Life’s meaning—we use the term, knowing how it, like all terms and things, plays in shadow and rain—stretches to 2 and, in the stretching we feel the risk of snapping.  Do we stretch to feel the risk?

The Dangers

When one ventures into nature, warning signs abound.  Moose!  Steep Cliffs!  Falling Rocks!  Duck Crossing!  Lightning Frequently Strikes Here On Thursdays!  High Winds!  And should you approach too closely to the ocean or defy a current, your fellow species-members will reveal a usually taciturn compassion and warn you of rogue waves and wayward sharks and malicious rocks.

These same people, though, when in the city, will happily watch you drive a car or step into a plane … and not say anything.  They won’t even think anything.  They won’t be alarmed in the slightest.  They do it too!  Yet unless you live in the middle of the Nile, you have far more chance getting damaged or finalized by a fellow species-member or one of his creations than anything from nature.

Danger is where you live, in your environment.  And our environment is the city, where rabid killers roam, requiring ransoms; raged drivers careen, seeking random revenges; terrorists lurk above eyesight, waiting to drop.

Of course, we built the city to escape the tiger and crocodile, the battalions of bees, the flesh-obsessed ants.  And in this escape attempt, we’ve largely succeeded.  Most reasonably reasonable people admit, though, that all we’ve done is substitute the danger of ourselves—our missiles and vehicles—for all those indifferent hungry animals.

True.

Unfortunately, we haven’t simply substituted dangers, but have added to them.  Let’s draw a chart to illustrate the compounding dangers.

	Man in Nature	Man in the City
Dangers	1.   Beasts and Insects 2.   Acts of God 3.   Disease and Pestilence	1.   Technology 2.   Acts of God 3.   Disease and Pestilence 4.   Elimination of Beasts and Insects
Dangers Minimized or Eliminated	—	1.   Beasts and Insects

The fourth urban danger is not the separation of man’s environment and the tiger’s, but the gradual destruction of natural environments that, in turn, destroy—or threaten to destroy—key threads and nodes in life’s web (such as the bee) that, in turn, threaten to destroy us.

Thus, in a comic irony—comic from a divine or demonic perspective anyway—the very threat we’ve spent so much time and effort to diminish and eliminate, while appearing to have been dealt with, transforms itself in the shadows to a different form … and all we’ve done is add a new danger (our creations) and transform (unwittingly) an old one.

Yet we still, perhaps from desperation, consider ourselves clever.  Likely from desperation, as we go so far as to proclaim this the age of knowledge.

What should we then react to?  When should mothers scream, grandfathers solemnly warn, and sensitive people everywhere breathe cautious cautions?  Well, obviously, whenever they spot the real danger … the source.  Whenever they see a man.

2:0 - opening 3

We can think of God as the ratio 2:0.  This ratio itself is an object.  But, more fundamentally, 2:0 is an experience.

2 is the myriad world of opposites — love and hate, life and death, female and male, creator and creature.  It both includes and does not include God.  But even the exclusion includes God.

0 is utter emptiness, and reduces humanity to the starkest midnight isolation.  0 is wholly other.

2 is in relationship with 0 because of : or Spirit.  If it were otherwise, emptiness would be wholly unknowable to us and us to emptiness.  : is the bridge between our unspeakable void and our word-filled life.

God is the totality of the worlds of 2, 0 and the relational space perpetually in motion between them.  All errors spring from emphasizing one part of the ratio and diminishing one or more of the others.  God only lives as an irreducible totality.

[

To use language to speak of God is necessary, real and inevitable.  Yet to leave God in language is a reduction and desecration.  To think that God only exists in thinking and speaking is not to have had experience of God.  If you have not experienced God, words may point you to God but they can never in themselves show God to you.  More likely, you will want to treat words as an object and dispute them.  Language and ideas are partially objects and so can and should be disputed.  But God, in the divine totality, includes but is beyond disputation.

Friday Thoughts

I wish to establish systems for those who live outside the systems established by the systems to look after those outside the systems.

One builds and maintains diversity through structure in the postmodern world.  But in order to lead this building, one has to be diverse oneself:  to include within the self—and to possess the techniques required to cope with this inclusion—contradictory, irreconcilable, irreducible voices and values.  Technology (of which structure is a form) becomes Spirit’s (spirits’ ?) strategic partner.  God cannot enter humanity except through technology.  This is the breach, the wound, at the heart of Spirit presently.

I live now at the limits of language.  I speak from a space outside of language, using language to translate the silence, the emptiness, of that space.  An odd convergence of Wittgenstein and the Tao.

Authentic subversion is not perceived to be subversive, as it is unseen by the instruments of standardized power.  Authentic subversion is the subtle, slow workings of Spirit to alter the blind drive of nature through almost imperceptible acts of love.

Human 1:  Things aren’t what they seem.

Human 2:  Things are just what they seem.

Myth is subject to life, the body; history is subject to myth.

The vatic function is a function of geometry, a paying attention to the shapes of relationships.  The entropy of the average life is indirectly proportional to attention to relationships, to the vatic function.  The prophet resists entropy—to the extent possible permitted by physicality—by allowing him or herself to be contained by the empty spaces within the particular shapes given to him or her. 

I stay healthy by being legion, by indulging (accepting, observing, recording, listening, explaining) the diverse voices.  In so doing, I defeat Christ, and the pigs into which Legion was cast are safe, and the mad man remains in his cave in the city, and there is no messiah to cast Legion out.  This is the new good.

There is a community of the violated hiding in society.  This community refrains from violation because they have seen, they have felt, what violation does.  This is ethics and it is born from darkness.  This community works silently, subversively, cunningly, in little chunks, to undo the tsunami of violation that occurs each second on this planet.  Justice thus happens far from the marketplace; it is a form of art.

Perhaps what hurts most deeply in existence—the core acceptance which society is structured to resist—is that all the stories are valid, they’re all equal, they all must be authentically encountered.

The difference between vision inside something and outside it.  We posited God as a necessary fiction to expand our sight, to expand consciousness.  But now we posit what we call a non-fiction to perform the same function.  What is the discipline of this?  What are its methods?

Mrs. Vogler in Bergman’s Persona:  what happens to her after she returns to society?  The post-Persona question.  What happens after one has encountered absolute silence?  Masks and actors in Bergman (particularly in Persona, Fanny & Alexander, and The Seventh Seal) as psychic, mythic, and evolutionary truths.  Persona is like a subtler, nobler Pulp Fiction.

The 21.12.12 apocalyptic phenomenon may be analogous, at a global secular level, to the Jewish expectation of the messiah millennia ago.  The end of the world may come this December, but it won’t be noticed, even as the birth of Jesus wasn’t noticed, for it will be occurring in unexpected ways, in faraway corners, in the cracks of time.  This is the truth of myth.