There are certain junctures, certain moments, when certain ideas and assumptions are expressed by 'the Founders' or their pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-spiritual lackeys and those associated with them, which tend to call forth a reaction and response from me though, in truth, I am trying to disassociate myself from this place.
Sue wrote: "Poetry offers dreams, prose offers, at its best, insights into reality. Thinking truth and writing truth is always plain and simple. Lies and falsehoods are always presented in a tangle of knots."
This is a statement that flows out of a nearly pure ignorance, and that particularly aggressive form that is willful stupidity. It is the kind of statement that reflects as it expresses a
commitment to ignorant understanding, but is yet so large and so vast in its implications that one is duty bound to say a few things against it.
The pseudo-philosophy and pseudo-spirituality of the Founders is based, right from the very beginning, on groups of misunderstandings, willful misinterpretations, violent declarations of falsity, even as it establishes itself as some sort of super-spiritual healing balm for man. I am convinced more than I ever was that this is a purely destructive project, it even has something of the devilish in it. And by that I mean deliberate turnings-against 'truth' or the brightness of life, the brightness of the spirit, a combined and unified working with the 'whole human-being', a turning against imagination, against beauty in a very real sense.
These 'installed tools' and 'lenses of perception' one notes particularly and
painfully obviously at work in the forum's resident moron, Dennis Mahar, but certainly not only there. There is something very sad and really rather tragic in all this, but those who pipe-up so adamantly, who assert their ignorance so thoroughly, are themselves
completely unable to see themselves. This shroud of ignorance and as I say *violence* against the self, as it is enacted and rehearsed, only strengthens the force of that shroud, makes it harder and denser, more enveloping.
It is in this sense that I would very carefully suggest, yet with definite reservations, that this 'pseudo-philosophy' has a decidedly dark underbelly. While it declaims and asserts liberation and freedom, it actively destroys the subtle nervous structure that links man to higher things: higher feelings, visions of beauty, the *language* which is both spiritually-based and based in man's body, that is in our tangible, factual existence in space and time. It is a 'philosophy' and a
practice of ideation that severs, cuts off from, shears-away from. The person that does this is, sadly, often an obviously mediocre being, but is one who
chooses in a sense his mediocrity, who strengthens it, who establishes it as a value in much the same way as the run-of-the-mill Christian does, or the beer-guzzling, brutal punk. One has to point out and one has to see that the motivator that drives this pseudo-spirituality is in truth something utterly common, but not common and *innocent* (beautiful in simplicity), but rather something common and
perverted. It comes from a lower-level both in the mind and in the body, and because of its self-will and arrogance and complete unwillingness to ascend with higher trends or even to be
aware of them ('obstinacy makes one unable to hear for all that one has ears' says Chinese wisdom), this 'pseudo-spirituality' edges into an area that could be called evil. But if that is true it is something that has to be decided by each one who listens, who participates here.
You represent yourself, Sue, as One Who Knows (something). You declare that poetry 'offers dreams at best' and then you speak about what is 'best' in prose in a declarative attitude as if you have any idea what you are talking about! You go on to assert things about the thinking about truth and the writing of truth, but I suggest that you (and your ilk) are not involved in 'truth' and in many very significant ways you don't have the slightest idea what it is, even
IF you endlessly quote the Zen masters, or Kierkegaard, or Nietzsche, or anyone. This is exactly where you begin to edge into an area of evil: you make declarative statements as if you actually know where the 'entranceway' into truth is, but your entranceway is actually not much more than entering a darkened cave. Entering into this cave, one shears off from self, settles into a group of reductions and misinterpretations about life, a simplistic and reductive 'mechanism of perception' that is limitation itself, and you invite others to join you there in your darkened project. I suggest that you very carefully examine the karmic implications of what you are
actively doing.
IF it turns out that you are binding-up and not unbinding people (and yourselves) spiritually, you are contributing to a shrouding and a darkening, and I tell you most directly that there are heavy prices to be paid for this.
You go on to make declarative statements about what
ARE lies and falsehoods, again as if you know everything about this, as if you have it all worked out. (You and David---the super spiritual duo---have set yourselves up as authorities---or is it only that you hang on his shirttails?) But right there is your lie! And your knotty little tangle of prose! What you say is that 'truth is simple', and it is inferred that you know this 'simple truth'. But I suggest to you that this is a lie. You have arrogated to yourself a position and an understanding that you do not in fact have. I also suggest to you that there are ramifications to this arrogation and that you should take care.
Anyone who has lived in this domain where we live knows intuitively or consciously that there is very little that is 'easy' of interpretation here. From the simplest thing right up to the greatest and most important questions about life and existence one recognizes that there is nothing particularly 'easy' or simple about arriving at understanding. The most anodyne declaration (in prose), the most basic statement by authorities, by advertising, and certainly by Scripture, all require very sophisticated interpretive skill. This life is about gaining interpretive skill and it is a demanding business to be sure. Nothing can be taken at face value and the longer we live here the more this fact seems to be driven home.
Now, those who tell us 'truth is simple' (and 'I have this truth') are usually spiders of sorts with invisible webs. We are attracted to declarations of simplicity and so we approach, and if we are not very careful, we get entangled and mired in a predator's mesh. The fact that you don't take this into account---you don't even mention it---is evidence, dear child, that you are offering a bait and that you are, in your way, a spider. Your bait is the reduction you serve, the willful ignorance that motivates your idea-structure, and false-promises of 'liberation'. But I have written about this so often that I won't bother to repeat it. And anyway we are talking about poetry, aren't we? ;-)
So, a poem, according to you, is linked to 'dreams' and of course dreams are a no-no in your pseudo-spirituality of sheer awakeness, am I right you little kangaroo chopper? (Anyone who reads such declarations knows that they are theological statements, deeply rhetorical, and that you are, in fact, talking about your own awakenness in *absolute truth*). But you, even at the most basic level, have no understanding about poetry, even if it were cheap and run-of-the-mill poetry, pure sentimentalist poetry say, High School poetry. It is more accurate to say that poetry (if one can speak so generally) deals in and 'employs'
memory. Memory is I think an area that can be described as 'divine'. When biological beings begin to develop and evolve, it is the memory---the ability and practice of remembering---that is developed alongside reasoning and brainpower. The wise men are men of tremendous memory, that is they can recur to vast relationships and interrelationships that are 'held' inside of their own selves. Lacking this, and engaging in immediacy of impression (sensuality) and having no other higher interest or calling or activity, we are little more than hopped-up machines. And many people seem to exist at that level for all their lives. We call it lower-order existence and perhaps 'brutality'.
A poem is a unique and very special domain, or the creation of a special and unique domain within man. It is bound up with *language* which is also 'divine' if anything is divine, and that is why scriptural language, be it Hebrew or Sanskrit, etc., is described as being a divine gift, and the *meaning* that comes down with language is considered divine indeed: inspired
. Through the higher faculties of language and meaning we approach perceptions and states of being of a higher order. (And this is why I say that the pseudo-philosophy of GF, by and large, is a project of limiting language, limiting *meaning* and is therefore 'dark' and 'destructive'). So, just for example, when I included the little poem:
- A fire of birds sweeps down
The haunted wind
And gods of light walk through
This green wood
...there are many levels of meaning expressed in it. Yet not only meaning but an agility of perception with obvious connections to the way that *meaning* and *value* are seen to come to us. In a certain sense it is not the specificity of the poem that has relevance, but the connections and possibilities that stand, if you will, behind it. There are many different elements in it: the nature of light (and if light is not of supreme meaning and importance as a subject for man's mind I don't know what is...), the idea of a 'fire' that 'sweeps down' on a 'haunted wind' has so many different and yet condensed levels of reference and possible meaning that it would take a while to exhaust them. And yet even if---say resorting to your mechanical and 'rationalistic' means of seeing or being---one took it all apart, layed it out, labeled each element, explained it all: the magic of the meaning that had been encapsulated and expressed would have to pull itself together and become exactly what it was all over again. A poem. That is one of the things about a good poem (and about Scriptural meaning) is that you can pick it apart, go into interpretive mode, apply hermeneutical skill, but there is no final nor (*snarling laughter*) 'absolute’ meaning to be extracted. One might be pulled up into meaning but can one indeed pull down into absolute interpretive sense? Can you really contain it? Can it really be contained?
Now, I have suggested time and time again that with *you* and *you-all*, one can gesticulate until one's wrists dislocate, one can speak until one's tongue grows numb, and yet *you* are unreachable. I know this. I am rather clever in fact! But I write this not to illuminate you nor condemn you (the road you are on, those collapsing pathways, I suggest, is all the punishment you need), but for those others who read here. I am deliberately establishing alternatives to your violent, stupid declarations.
Finally, if there
IS a place for anger, it is an anger that propels one to get out from under the force and weight of your dark ignorance. How many people have you crushed under it? Hmmmmm?
Knotty, knotty girl! ;-)