Definitions

What if things, both concrete and abstract, were defined not by what they are, but by how they become? Becoming...coming-to-be and passing-away are phases of most all things within the cosmos. Being and becoming are the same because time does not stand still. A concept or thing can not be pinned down by a definition that captures in in only one moment of it's existence. A true definition must encompass all of the defined's becoming, and thus is impossible for us who are within the cosmos to fully comprehend.

The Power of Words

Words create the "land beyond nature," i.e. the meta-physical realm. In the ancient world a war was fought for the sole title to the land beyond nature. The importance of this war to its participants was this:

(AXIOM): In the land beyond nature all thought forms expressible in words are at base level of equal value due to their existence alone.

However, in order to uphold a social order in the natural world, the land beyond nature must seem to be monolithic,. i.e. holding to a certain set of acceptable principles upon which the social order is constructed. All who oppose these principles must be condemned as infidels or heretics because they, by their mere existence, attack the very foundation of society. Few indeed have broken through to this fundamental axiom....

Today, however, we have Gaga...

Wordstream II

Over in my place the place where i have been put there has now been time for thought and time to process the stream of life that flows through and around and beyond past me into the shadowed future but here now my thoughts conspire to examine all the more than i can see and jump they do from star to star around the cosmos galaxy universe membrane dimensional field as they attempt to process all potential phenomena in that which does exist or exists not yet or existed once but now so long forgotten and lost that i begin to seek the energy more and more to reach the full potential of what must be so up and up we soar again to follow the ancient metaphor of the religious ones the seekers who have in the past defied the bonds of their kin and place to see beyond the all and tear through the membrane the walls of night the very bonds of physical reality that pretend to tie us here to place and time but then upreaching at last i come to the marvel world of light and life the phos and zoe of those gnostic minds who saw before to all of this yet could not say in a distinctive way that could not be mocked by those in power but now o yes i have arrives to claim the strength to feel the light of wonder love and true untruth that lies beyond for all who seek it there in that place which is no place where all began so long ago to form through its energy then released to brightly expand and show the all which we can only see in shadow form just now.

Wordstream I

Well aloft aloft i float suddenly as if my weight has fallen all away and at last along the way of life i can soar free of all earthly dross and societal constraints imposed on me by gods and ancestors so long age that most have forgotten how they ever came to be but they are o yes they are and they are here with us every day as we walk in the mud and the rain ahh now yes not today for me because i have escaped for this brief moment and soared up to the lofty heavens where only the gods have been allowed to dwell along with the holy ones of earth that we humans have elevated but why o why just those and why not others for to limit is to control and for my brief moment i do so want to feel the freedom of the weightless clouds and look as i choose down to see those dear friends i cherish and say to them come, o please come along with me to the golden gates of this paradise eden wonder space, a magic circle where we can all meet as spirits who are truly able to commune with one another and freely give the empathetic love and life support that we all so feel the lack of in our daily lives upon the surface of that often cold, wet and dark planet out of which our bodies formed to live but a brief span of life and then to plunge away into what o what we cannot say for sure but our hope remains as the substance of our dream that we will then at last be able to float freely on the wonderous places that our imagination shows us.

Hölderlin and his education

During the Reformation, England destroyed its monasteries. Hölderlin's homeland turned them into schools. At Kloster Denkendorf and Kloster Maulbronn, young Hölderlin was prepared for the prize, Tübingen Seminary. A holy caste of pastors, caretakers, educators and officials had grown up to be as much of a state within a state as the Catholic Church had ever been. Hölderlin, as a member of this caste, was expected to take his place where and when it was assigned to him. His education at Tübingen was free, but if he ever defaulted on his state church obligations, he would be obliged to pay it back in full. This he was never in position to do, since, like Baudelaire, his mother and her financial advisors controlled his inheritance throughout his life.

Gottlieb Christian Storr (1746-1805) was Hölderlin's professor of theology at Tübingen. He gave a nod to the Enlightenment, which enraged the traditionalists, but in the eyes of the students secretly reading Kant, he did not go far enough. This "Old Tübingen School" recognized the validity and possibility of divine revelation, but did not believe that Divinity spoke today.

So what did Hölderlin learn from his religious education? Well, if we accept that divine revelation was possible in Bible times, then why is it now now possible? And if it is possible today, who within our society is best equipped to receive the word of God? Not the clergy, with their rigid adherence to dead forms, and the belief that Jesus had been the best and last revealer. Not the government, who know it was dangerous to have unrestricted access to divine things. The other half of Hölderlin's education gave him the answer--the Classical World. Since the time of Augustine and Jerome, the Church was tied to the great pre-Christian models of the liberal arts. Hölderlin says to us that divine revelation is still possible and the poet is the one who is best equipped to reveal divine words to the community. Thus his education proved both his making and his undoing. Like many students of theology and the Classical world, he was pulled in two directions: to see the Dantean Christian Kosmos and be a part of it and to see that humans had once lived another way in a time when they knew neither Jesus nor the Bible. Hölderlin found his path, but did not find his community to be receptive. While Storr's pupils continued to focus on God's Biblical communication through His chosen messengers, Hölderlin tapped into the wellspring of divine life, and in the doing found the ecstasy and emptiness that accompany the office of divine messenger.

Getting rid of attached books

Haaa! Here I am again in my library trying to get rid of books. It is sooo hard to do because each of them is attached to a personal narrative about time & place, interests long cherished, or to the person who gave them to me. So how do I break free from these narrative attachments? Well first I must single out the personas that serve as the focus of the narratives. The bits of identity that comprise "me" (Lacan's le corps morcele) have gathered into these chemical compound-y things. These personas, as I will call them for lack of a better term, are imprinted with an idealized image and labeled with a name, such as "me the scholar ...behind my Lennon-glasses I am wise and kind, always eager to study history and philosophy."

But these seemingly benign personas have trapped me. They are difficult to live up to, for one thing, and the bits of me that are excluded from their mix cry out for attention--and go off to form personas of their own. (Be quiet, Mariko! Not NOW!) That may be the norm in Second Life, where these personas can be given pixilated form, but in Real Life, this process becomes problematic. As narratives of support for or the failures of these personas weave themselves around them, they become like prisons.

So how can we free our identity from these personas, which grow in power as we use them in our interactions with others, and as narratives grow upon them like weeds? Julia Kristeva says we should use language to free ourselves from these bonds. We must disrupt our process of identifying with the personas we have created or have been created for us by the expectations of others. When we believe in and act out our narratives, we are in as much of a fantasy world as Oz or Middle Earth. The narratives are easy and comfortable habits to slip into, but they are self defeating as they keep us going around in circles, stuck in the same ruts. Help me, Julia! If I cannot be a sage like T'oegye, free from narrative attachment to the past or the future, at least let me have more conscious control over what I do have.

*Ahem*...anyway, to get back to the original problem, the personas that have attached to the narratives of why I am such a person who should like these topics or should read these books...today, here and now, I confront you! Monk, Renaissance scholar, Hermetic Philosopher, Wm. Blake scholar, JRRT lover, Bible student! You are not me! (What a presumptive collection!) All of you together have included in your make-up parts of me, but not some of the most important parts (like humor, general silliness &c)! Begone, I adjure and command you, in the name of the Thrice Great Hermes and his disciple Tat...(oops), ummm...I mean, in the name of Ozma, fairy soverign of the marvelous land of Oz! Ok, that's done, now...back to the books. Anyone want a 38 volume set of the Church Fathers?

Prioritizze, dammit!

There are just too many things I want to do just now, and too many that I thought I wanted to do that still cling to me. I am reading through the Oz books...all of them I can find, anyway. Hope Shanower & Smith finish as many as they can for Marvel Comics. Ozma and Dorothy will meet this fall in Marvel's version of Ozma of Oz. I'm in the RPTs now, and to me they have their own unique charm, just as the LFBs did. I love little kingdoms with their little courts, and I wish that Germany and India were still full of them :)

Am trying to get through Proclus' On Timaeus too, but it's Thomas Taylor's almost 200 year old translation, so it is a struggle. Damascius' great work will be out this year, in a modern translation~~I hope to have better luck with that; it is a foundational work of 6th-7th century thought, I believe. I want to find the time to watch Wagner's Lohengrin again, and to finish Tannhauser at last, esp. after reading Baudelaire's essay, but when will I have the time? Watching all this anime is eating up my free time...Persona, and Toradora, then on to Spice & Wolf and...and...

Have I had enough of history? I would like to find a good home for some of my books, but not if I will be filled with regret about it 5 years from now. The church fathers can go, I have had enough of them, but am I really ready to give up on William Blake, and Tolkein? Joyce went away, and I don't miss him...well maybe just that one passage at the end of Portrait of the Artist.

Aah! Help! I have really got to set my library in order...where can I find the will power.....