Year Five

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

Fifth Year:  Business and Politics

Business and politics are the will to the creation and destruction of social edifices.  While they can differ somewhat in their landscapes, their means and ends, apart from relatively superficial differences, are the same.  The arguments, occasionally virulent, as to whether politics controls business or business controls politics are specious and only designed to serve those who are making them; the two spheres are bound to each other by themselves being bound to the collective will.

The collective will is most evidenced by both the results of business and politics and their processes, although in the technological age, processes can sometimes be results, at least for study by historians and the curious, who observe remnants, often many times removed, of a society’s collective will.

While business and politics operate two or more degrees in separation from land and blood, and thus war, they are their agents, effects and intermediaries.  As agents, they precipitate war; as effects, they are altered by it; as intermediaries, they expose and protect people to and from war’s effects¾exposing during war and protecting during peace.  The initiate, in being active in business or politics during this fifth year, should observe their relationship to war and the people.  She should notice the laundering function of business, neither decrying nor encouraging it, but absorbing its necessity; for humans cannot always be at war, which must be an exceptional activity.  Business¾and when we use simply business we mean business and politics, the conglomerate of enterprise that reflects and manages the collective will¾allows for the basic instincts of the human will to work themselves out, without incessant carnage.  In this sense, business is not simply necessary, but good.

In a transnational age, politics is the fingers of land, reaching through the world, dabbing the land’s name and remnant rites and symbols in urban densities across the globe.  So politics is often the management of fingers and dabbing, the marketing of a word and a flag.  In such a way, the collective will is felt on occasion in the individual will and so the individual will is temporarily inflated, like a balloon.

Business, hyperventilating invisible currencies, numbers and resources, not being subject to the legacy of land but rather being the first virtual entities since the death of God, encircles the globe with its never-sleeping, ever-active eyes, orbiting to the beat of the collective will.

The initiate should obtain a position in government or business where she can, in an optimum manner, observe and participate in the processes, subterfuges and the will of which we speak.  She should observe the relationship between the individual and collective will, according to the hierarchy we earlier described.  The more the initiate has access to decision makers, the more she will have the opportunity to absorb the distinctive workings of business.

The reader should note that it is unlikely that the initiate will be a decision maker, or even that she should be¾the former due to insufficient time to establish credibility; the latter due to the difficulty in allowing the initiate adequate time for observation.  For it can be truthfully said that any competent business leader, by virtue of being competent at business, cannot observe himself with any significant articulation.  It is one of life’s ironies and core restrictions that one cannot be great at doing and reflecting, whether this reflection be of the mind or of art.

Now it is true that the great businessperson is a kind of mirror, reflecting the will of the people, and the greatest businessperson is a highly polished mirror in the way in which we have spoken that the artist is.  So all greatness is the greatness of mirrors and the act of polishing, and all mediocrity is due to dirt, and in the deep vacancy of the mirror and in the studious application of the polishing rag greatness meets and dissolves.  So, from the eyeless depths of the mirror, the great businessperson is an artist. 

The reader may be asking whether one could not argue then whether all are artists, for don’t all reflect the world?  Don’t all meet in the mirror, in that space without horizon, in life’s funhouse where one looks into the glass and sees a laughing Buddha and a skull?  The initiate should ponder these questions as she moves among the great and the small, the mediocre and the memorable.

Yet, even so, these Exercises are devoted to the development of the artist, and we have not been ashamed to say the development of a particular kind.  This kind is one who reflects the world in images, sound or word, and what we do know is that she cannot do this and manage the world.  One cannot be two kinds of artist and be of any worth at either.  The initiate spends a year in business not to reflect the world through business, but to trace a certain aspect of the soul within herself.

The reader may object that in the first phase of these Exercises, particularly in the first two years of that phase, the initiate became debauched and then ascetic, and was not simply called upon to mingle with the debauched and ascetic and observe them.  But one can become a great reprobate for a year and give it up; one cannot become a great general or businessperson in a year.  Thus our methods must shift with possibility, and the initiate may do well to reflect on the greater complexities that arise once one expands from the body, for these complexities are what we live within and what the artist must not just live within and have absorbed, but see, ideally in each moment as she moves.

Many artists avoid, through temperament or aversion, the world of business, but this is unfortunate and a blight on their development, for this world, more than any other, exposes the initiate to social power; it is, indeed, the only year dedicated to such power.

For the person dedicated to business is one who lives and breathes power¾not the power of bodies explored in the first phase of the Exercises, nor the brute power of nature and its technological extension, explored in the previous year, but the power of the unseen extension of humanity:  language and its offspring:   nuance, subtlety, charm, ambiguity, firmness (definition), value, deed, context, adaptability, surprise, evolution, suggestion, motivation and its thousand shields, consensus, fluidity.  Indeed, the initiate should explore the relationship between language and social power, for the two, while not one, are tightly interwoven.  Social power is made from the tension between light and darkness:  what is hidden, what to hide; what is shown, what to reveal.  This dynamic is in perpetual motion, and the adept in business are highly attuned to its motion, and place themselves firmly at its centre, and do not move.

Year Four

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

Presuppositions

The will is the assertion of the body, both individually¾as the individual person attempts to extend himself in time and space¾and collectively¾as groups, both small and large, cultures, both minor and major, and the human species as a whole, attempt to extend themselves also in time and space.  This assertion¾continuous, natural and inevitable, amoral at its root while using morality and immorality to achieve its purposes, basic and raw, problematic¾works its way through time, a gaseous energy giving birth to the myriad forms.

At its most basic level, the will is sexual:  a mulching, devouring bog, hidden, subtle, sucking all orbiting forms into its viscous depths; a lightning bolt from a midnight sky, spewing fire and seed on the world.  Through the sexual will, tension is maintained, individuals are established on a hierarchy, bonds are forged and broken, individual lives are briefly and overtly extended past their deaths through memory, word and image, covertly extended through genetic and personal influence, and the species extends itself in time and space.

Beyond sex, the will directs itself at land:  the security of space, a portion of the earth for my family, my people; a symbol of strength and plenty, a diverse provider of indifferent beauty and sustenance for the bodies I consider linked to mine.  War is the mechanism by which the will trades in land; blood is shed for beauty, creation and destruction are bound.  Who does not hear the thorny call of war in the foundations of one’s will?  Who does not heed its call, though the obedience be vicarious, sublimated or complicit?  The war for land has many forms, and must be maintained continuously in the very mores of a land’s citizens long after the land has been won.  Blood becomes diffused; yet it still is blood, even though it be made into bricks and movies, cushions and prayers.

Beyond land, the will directs itself at society and culture:  the birth, growth, maintenance, regulation, and destruction of institutions, regimes, symbols, and procedures.  Like the will directed toward land, the will directed toward society and culture works itself individually and collectively, through the chaotic, organized system of many individuals exerting themselves, working with each other, often with many others, to an end, but an end which is also a beginning.

Beyond society and culture, the will directs itself at the species itself.  This collective self-direction partially brings us back to the basic level of sex, for as we said and everyone knows, sex is both the individual and collective will¾the common individual will, even as death is the common individual non-will.  Land and society and culture link the individual will and the common will; they provide flesh to human experience and bonds.  As the basic will directed at sex is dense with power, so is the species' will.  As the individual caught up in his sexual will is full of his ascendancy over other individuals¾though the moment he reflects, the completion of his ascendancy remains in doubt¾so the species caught up in its species will is full of its ascendancy¾though this fullness is diffused through its individual members, it frequently provides a bond between them.  Again, upon reflection, this fullness becomes dubious, but in the technological environment such reflection becomes difficult as its own species becomes all that is seen and the only mirror is itself, thus making external mirrors disappear and forcing reflection to become based on a new kind of a mirror:  an internal one, created by the power of the human spirit.  As the individual sexual will in its purity attempts to dominate over as many other bodies¾directly and indirectly¾in its lifetime, so the collective species will, through cooperative human efforts, attempts to dominate over as many other species in its lifetime as possible.  The metropolis is the embodiment and apex of this domination, where humanity feels supreme.  But, although these Aesthetic Exercises are not the context to pursue this issue, nature, to which humanity remains subject though it continually attempts an escape, has limits¾at its circumference, at its lows and highs¾and when these limits are reached, but movement still must be maintained according to the fate of a species’ genetic code, movement must go in the opposite direction, and so the dominated return to domination.

Beyond the species, the will directs itself at the universe.  Such direction is qualitatively different than the aforementioned directions, for the hierarchies inherent in sex, land, society and culture, and species, while not obliterated, give way to the hierarchy that is no hierarchy:  the swirling energy and sound of the whole.  Here, the will transforms itself; such transformation is a rare calling and, as such, while some argue that this calling is that of the human species itself¾its distinction¾the degree of its rarity bespeaks for its exception.

There are some who pretend to exercise this universal will who would negate the hierarchies we have briefly outlined; but this negation reveals them as soft frauds.  True:  this exception will brings softness, but with it hardness, for not only is one’s individual life made insignificant, along with one’s strivings and ambitions, but the species to which one belongs, with its beauty and achievements, is brought to nothing.  How many can face such nothingness and yet be?  To maintain this combination stretches the dualities to the outmost of their tether and lives in the stretched tension.  This is the tension of the mystic and the artist¾the former who lives in teeming nothingness and does not create; the latter who lives in this same nothingness¾the fabric of the universe, below molecules, atoms, protons, quarks¾and does.  These three years¾the fourth through sixth¾are designed to embody the major manifestations of the will in the artist:  further strengthening, foundation, for her aesthetic womb.

Always, the will directs itself at the fundamentals of time and space, with the exception of when it directs itself at the universe, when the will becomes time and space and so negates itself.  We will speak more of this later.

The will is born to conflict:  conflict within the individual, as the will struggles with its various objects and with the other aspects of the individual (body, mind, soul, judgement); conflict between individuals¾inevitable, unpredictable, mild and severe, obvious and hidden¾between groups, nations and species.

The will is born to action and action is the evidence of its existence and legitimacy.  The philosopher and the sage may be suspicious of or deride action, but they are so and do so because of their orientation or age, and even they must act in minimal ways to live and fulfill their souls, even as they must depend on others to act to help them.  Where is the one who does not depend on action?  If you show him to me, then he depends on action.  This does not delegitimize the sage’s critique, but it does show that the sage’s critique is not the world in its entirety, but only a portion of it.  We may trust the sage more than the man of action, but this trust is innate to the essence of the respective vocation. 

The artist should know the will at all its levels¾from the sexual to the universal.

Meditations

The meditations should be reflected on before, during and after the acts of the will, according to one’s inclinations and ability.  For some, such meditations will occur naturally, even as one is giving oneself over to the will; for others, the activities will be too distracting, particularly in the first and second years, to adequately meditate on what is occurring.  Still for others, they will need to wait until the acts of the mind or even later, when they have gained sufficient experience to be able to reflect on what took place years before in their lives.

Meditate on the gap between the will’s intent and the will’s result.

Meditate on the shape of the will:  the hierarchies, the lines and triangles, of sex, land, society and culture, and species; the circle of the universe which embraces and does not deny all other shapes.

Meditate on the will’s inclusion within itself of its opposite.  Relate this to the will to life and death.  To what extent does the will desire to destroy itself?  Think on the relationship between will and fatigue.

Meditate on the bonds between the individual will and the collective will:  what strengthens and weakens them.

Meditate on the degree to which mind and will are antithetical, and the potential inevitability of this antithesis.

Meditate on the conflicting wills within the single individual; relate this internal conflict of the many wills within the individual to the external conflict between the many individuals within the one group and species.

Meditate on the relationship between will and love, including in this meditation both a general reflection and a specific reflection at each level of the will we discussed:  sex, land, society and culture, species, universe.

Meditate on the relationship between will and language, and whether language feeds the will.

Meditate on the will’s will to subsume everything into itself, to become one.  In relation to this, meditate on the relationship between will and number.

Meditate on the will’s tendency to ecstasy, misery and stability.  Are there specific tendencies of the will and/or specific characteristics of the context in which the will is exercised that contribute to its results?  In other words, to what extent is the will¾the relationship between its sources, motivations and effects¾arbitrary; to what extent are its non-arbitrary aspects¾if they indeed exist¾determinant and predictive?

Meditate on the relationship between the will and good and evil.  Relate your thoughts to each direction of the will.

Meditate on the will as a distinct faculty of the human soul, and its relationship to the other faculties.

Rationale

The will follows the body and precedes the mind.   The will is the first obviously distinct extension of the body, as we showed earlier when we explained the concentric circles of the will:  sex (the human body), land (the body of the earth), society and culture (the body politic), the species (the collective human body) and the universe (all bodies and their emanations).  The body has to be explored first, as it is the foundation of everything we are and do, think and strive for.  In moving to the will, we specifically explore the striving for what we are and do and think.

We must copulate to collectively survive, but we must will to manufacture and continually inhabit what we call the human world and to feel within ourselves that we are not simply beasts, continuing in perpetuity, but humans, gloriously bound to create a world of our own making.

A human being can establish his name¾regardless of the merits or demerits of such establishment, an issue we shall not discuss in this context¾based solely on mastery in the areas of body and will; it is, in fact, often necessary to only exercise one’s body and will to achieve success in human affairs¾mastery in mind and soul being a severe impediment to effective action, mastery in judgement depending on the form of politics in vogue in one’s particular time and space.

However, the artist lives at the intersection of name and namelessness, action and reflection, and while she must establish the basis¾both animal and human¾of the totality of human personhood through embodying the primary modes of the body and will, she is a severely stunted artist and not one whom we address in these Exercises if she, like many warriors, businesspeople and politicians, stop developing herself at the end of body and will, or if these two faculties be dominant over the faculties yet to be discussed.  The artist is a mirror of the universe; the body and the will are the universe’s brute foundations; such foundations are necessary¾let this necessity be always kept in mind¾but they are not its excellence.

Method

In this second phase of the Exercises, we explore the will through three distinct years:  war, business and politics, and non-will.  War is linked to land, business and politics to society and culture, and non-will to the universe.

The initiate will have adequately explored sex in the first phase, the body phase.  The will for the species is partly an outcome of sex, as we’ve discussed above, and partly the bond formed in war, and society and culture, and thus will be integrated into the first two years of this phase.

The reader will observe that the first two years of this phase are qualitatively different than the third year, in the way that the will negates itself when it mirrors the universe.  This qualitative difference will become apparent as we progressively discuss each of the three years in this second phase. 

Fourth Year:  War

War is the visible manifestation of the will to land.  Historically, it has bound man to blood and blood to land.  Now, the earth being cultivated and blood being hidden, war may be changing its nature and function; the initiate should reflect on this.

However, the focus of this year is action, not reflection, and the initiate should engage herself for the year in active military duty.  This duty should not be in a management, strategic or support role¾for example, as a general, doctor or priest¾but as a fighter; the closer the fighting is to land and blood, the better, although we acknowledge the increasing difficulty of obtaining such work in war.  The initiate can consider either service as a dedicated fighter or as a mercenary.  While terrorist activities could be considered, they should be engaged in as a last resort.

While the initiate should not gratuitously damage and destroy buildings, land and people, it is likely that she will do so in the course of duty.  Not only is it likely, but, from the perspective of this phase of these Exercises, desirable, for such is the nature of war, and should the initiate not experience such destruction, she will not have truly internalized war’s spirit.

The initiate should not shrink from destruction, carnage, the slaughter of innocents, the annihilation of people, buildings, architecture of a significant nature, priceless art, vast libraries and collections of specimens and history¾a people’s cultural memory.  She should not shrink from rape, dismemberment, quartering, hanging, burning and burial alive, the removal of eyes, starvation, the humiliation, torture and death of the enemy before loved ones, the drinking of and bathing in blood, using frozen bodies as toboggans, castration, sodomizing children, bestiality, tying scalped heads to branches to form trees of hanging heads.  In short, the initiate should give herself to the raw butchery, glory and rights of war.

War concerns change through destruction, and destruction is achieved by the direct combat of individual bodies, albeit increasingly with the aid of technology.  Through destruction, the new arises:  new names, new borders, new structures, new stories.  Without destruction, all would be repetition.  War is the most visible collective mechanism of destruction.  It illustrates most directly the nature of the collective will and the base hopes and fears of individuals and groups.  Through blood and horror, the initiate should listen to the mutterings, screams and sufferings of the dying and survivors, of those who love and hate them.  The initiate should search for the space between the rhetoric of the two battling sides, for in this space¾hidden, silent, dark¾a curious unity can be found.

Many initiates will be maimed or lost during this year, but those that survive will have absorbed important truths, for the shrouds of society cover a motley host of necessities to which we are all subject in our mortal chains, and these truths will be there in the initiate’s foundation to use for creating a mirror of the world.  Without them, the artist’s work will lack the gravity requisite for any creation of substance.  Let the initiate maim and slaughter, and let her come to the edge of losing her soul.

Year Three

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

Acts:  Third Year

If the initiate has survived the first two years, with the respective risks of decadence and deprivation, she may initially welcome this third year in which she explores normal restraint and moderation.  Although, as we mentioned earlier, this year¾the immersion in the average¾may be remembered as the most difficult year of all.  Some adjustments may be required.

Why such potential problems with the average?  There are two primary reasons for this; we’ll discuss these in turn, but first need to clarify what we mean by the term average.  By average we mean human attitudes and behaviors that fall roughly between the extremes detected in the vast and rugged sphere of all human attitudes and behaviors that have existed or do exist.  (We exclude human attitudes and behaviors that will or may exist, for what we hope are obvious reasons.)  By average we do not necessarily mean balance, for while balance is sometimes used synonymously with average, it can be used in the sense of two equal and opposing weights; but this latter meaning, the commonest, is not at all what we intend in this third year, for it suggests a totality of opposites, which itself is the precise opposite of the initiate’s objectives this year.  (Which raises the issue¾impossible to explore here¾of what the opposite of the totality of opposites is; does, for example, the totality of opposites include within itself its opposite, or is the average excluded?)  The average knows nothing of the extremes, existing, as it always does, never deviating, at the midpoint between.  The average consumes images of the extremes, but does not itself know the extremes¾the extremes for the average are always external.  One of the challenges for the initiate, of course, is that she has just lived two years at opposite extremes, and, no doubt, has noticed similarities between them, for the circumference of existence, no matter what the position on it, is made of the same spiritual material, and this material should be pardoned; the similarities between the first two years and year three are few if any.  So one of the challenges she faces is that she, unlike the person born average to live an average life, has, in entering into the average, already known¾absorbed and internalized¾a mode from the average:  what we might call balance, in the second definition we gave it.  This, then, is the initiate’s dominant practical problem:  how to attitudinally and behaviorally be average, when she is not.  Yet all she is called to do this third year is learn how to adopt the average and present it in such a way as to ensure others accept her as average.  For we find that it is sufficient for the purposes of many, and always sufficient for the purposes of the average, who are average because they are not perceptive, among other reasons, to present the desired mask in order to be understood as being what one is presented as.

Now, coming to the two primary reasons as to why the initiate is likely to find this third year the most difficult of all to date, and possibly the most difficult among the entire Exercises.  The first relates to what we have already been discussing¾that the extremes of existence are simply more interesting than the average.  Think of the soldier who has been in the trenches for five years, but has somehow survived and returns to normal civilian life.  All the rest of life seems dull; his problem¾although he may himself have been average¾is that he can no longer be average; he is consumed by images of the extreme he has consumed.  So the initiate will be bored and think even of her sufferings and humiliations with fondness, even though those experiences, when fully present, when embodied, were highly undesirable.  This problem, then, contains two important tasks.  Firstly, the initiate needs to deal effectively with her tendency to alter her average life; secondly, and this is more fundamental, being as it is attitudinal, and applying, as it does, to many aspects of life, she needs to deal with her emotional longing for an extreme existence.  This touches on many key issues.  As we just mentioned, the longing she will inevitably experience at this stage is based on a misrepresentation of times past¾or perhaps a dishonesty or lack of sight in the past¾thus the initiate may represent the past situation correctly, but the initial situation was misrepresented to herself at the time¾this tendency, whether manufactured in the past or present is deadly to the artist, for, as we outline in our Annotations, the artist can only achieve her goal of producing worthy art by becoming a mirror of the world¾but should the mirror reflect poorly, should it have dustballs or specks of misrepresentation on it¾she will produce sentiment, not art.  It is true that longing, desire, are part of reality¾perhaps the root of reality¾and the initiate must be intimate with them, but she must not mistake desire and experience; we desire heaven; we obtain earth, which includes the extremes of heaven and hell¾the extremes, and the average.

The initiate in this third year should train herself to desire what is, and what is is the world.  Otherwise, she becomes lost in nostalgia and envy¾emotions deadly to the nobility of art.  The reader can object that, this being the year of the average, and it being true that the average live in nostalgia and envy, that the initiate should immerse herself in this emotional miasma.  But keep in mind reader:  we are training what is rare by calling forth the rare, not calling forth the average to be trained to be average.  This year of the average is to expose the initiate to the pleasures, boredoms and temptations of the average, yes, even to learn to enjoy the average pleasures, suffer the average boredoms and succumb to the average temptations.  Even as there was risk of losing initiates in the first year to pleasure or death through pleasure’s risks and the second year to deprivation and its consequences, so this year there is the risk of losing initiates to the average; there will be those who find the routines and delights of this third year so becoming that they are unable to leave them behind.

The reader and initiate should note that, in a very real sense, we do not care whether the initiate persists in the appearance of the average; for when this first phase, the phase of the body, is completed, the initiate may lead a life of debauchery, asceticism or bourgeois respectability, as long as she continues to follow the Exercises in spirit and practice.  We warn simply at identification of soul and appearance¾for if the soul is fundamentally or predominantly bourgeois (or, indeed, for that matter, debauched or ascetic), the soul’s art will be unbalanced and so not be an adequate mirror to the world.  The artist should not be irrevocably seduced by any manifestation of the soul in the body, but simply follow her natural temperament once she has been exposed to the practices in this first phase.  Nevertheless, as before, some embarking on the Exercises will find their true home in this third year and thus should not proceed, but stay here and live out their respectable existences.

The second major problem, already inferred, is that the artist is not average, but rare.  Feelings of envy and nostalgia likely disgust her, secure as she is in her emerging vision and style¾regardless of how obscure these may be at this stage.  This third year may easily require the initiate to pursue paths far more foreign to her than those of decadence and asceticism.  Yet this very difficulty is key to the success of this year.  For the artist must learn to move among what are considered normal people, for these make up the bulk of humanity and in some manner sustain it through their sheer mass.  The main aesthetic difficulty with the extremes¾and here we arrive at the core truth of this year¾is that, while the artist is temperamentally inclined to live at the circumference of existence, the artist who externally lives there always produces inferior works to the artist who only internally lives there¾assuming equal talent.  This is quite logical:  we are mortal, finite beings with limited energy¾regardless of how we may feel at times¾the more the artist pushes her energy into the world, either in self-indulgence or flagellation, the less energy she has to push into her art.  Now it is true that sometimes the artist requires an injection of energy from the world to propel her forward and that without this she may stagnate or diminish, and that the frequency and severity of these injections can vary from individual to individual.  But let no one say that she needs, as a lifelong habit, regular, extreme injections of vitality; this only reveals a weak spirit¾but the spirit of the artist is strong.

Such injections are deceptive, for they are external addictions; the only addiction the artist should have is polishing her mirror¾a solely internal exercise.  She must know the externalities¾this is the reason for these Exercises, for we cannot reflect the world on behalf of the artist¾that is her task and her task alone, to be fully faced only after these Exercises are done¾but she must not habitualize any of them.  So this year of the average is critical in helping the initiate to begin containing her bodily energy.

The temptation she will face, as we have already discussed at length and as with the previous years, is to not become the average after she has successfully embodied it.  So let us discuss how the average looks and what the initiate must do this year.

Comforts

The initiate should surround herself with average comforts.  She should find employment that allows her to do so, this employment being neither conspicuous nor inconspicuous.  She should earn an average wage according to the norms for the region in which she lives and work an average number of hours a week.  She should vacation in places that average people enjoy, and throughout the year while she is not on vacation she should engage in activities, both within the home and outside, that are typical.  In nothing she does or says should she ever draw attention to herself, other than that natural for a person of average ego and standing.

She should, if such is the norm, and such a norm is likely, be in a heterosexual monogamous relationship, married if necessary.

She should decorate her home with acceptable furniture and prints and watch the television shows that everyone watches and talk about them in the way that people do.

Food

The initiate should shop at average supermarkets, eat at average restaurants, own average cookbooks and cook average recipes.  She should not be unduly carnivorous or vegetarian.  She should attempt in her diet to be reasonably balanced, without, however, obsession.  Obsession is not a hallmark of the average.  Duty, properness, niceness and conformity are the average virtues, and the initiate should do what she can to foster these virtues and exhibit them.

Sex

The initiate should take care not to be either too bored or too animated¾and certainly not too odd¾in relation to the sex act.  In terms of quantity, she should consult the many available studies and do her best, without neuroses, to conform to the average number of coitions per week in the typical positions in the typical venues, which we would expect to be the domestic bed.  Also, in terms of quality, she should neither be too dull or too delightful, responding and initiating with her partner, but not unduly.  Both excessive lechery and prudery are inappropriate, except on certain occasions, when such behavior would be called for, such as birthdays and funerals.

Image

In keeping with the spirit of this third year, which by now, even with the limited direction we have given we trust that the initiate will have understood, the initiate should strive only for an image in keeping with the average:  her ambitions should be average; she should accept both failure and success with an admixture of external equanimity and internal diluted resentment; her ambitions should be exercised in acceptable pursuits (for example:  accounting or marketing, and not pimping or espionage); her network of friends and acquaintances should be acceptable (that is, she should know many people casually and comfortably and no one well); her reputation should be untarnished (people should speak generally well of her, with some but minimal disregard); her name should be known, but not extensively and only in the natural circles of home and work; should she be so privileged as to be interviewed in the media, she should be internally proud and externally modest (she should tape the proceedings and file the labeled tape on noticeable but discreet display); she should have views on religion and politics, and indeed she should have opinions generally, that are neither vacant nor zealous, expressed with a certain amount of tactful earnestness but with no significant commitment or connection to her actual life; her clothing should be fashionable without her being called fashionable; she should know the names of those whose names are expected to be known and the facts in common circulation; she should not show undue emotion but neither should she be thought to be wooden; she should, on the whole, be reasonably satisfied with her lot in life and not reflect with any focus or duration, except perhaps in rare moments of inebriation, on meaning, life, death, meaninglessness, justice, love, peace, war, hope, faith, freedom, fate, chance, or any issue beyond that which is necessary to lead an average, comfortable existence.  In short, her life, appearance, thoughts, opinions, practices and dreams should be commonplace.

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.