10
If, by and large, people do not reflect (like
'the thinker', or philosopher), it isn't because they have been deprived of the
facility through sinister forces working against them, but simply because they don't
want to reflect, preferring an 'outgoing' disposition in relation, I would
contend, to female domination of society in general and of the demands made by
society and nature upon themselves. The Sun, for instance, does not encourage
reflection, being itself intensely 'outgoing', and the more sunshine a people
are habituated to, the less will they be inclined to reflection, as to thinking
deeply about anything. In fact, they will resemble roses, if not sunflowers.
Most people neither have the time nor inclination to reflect, and the thinking
exception only proves the thoughtless rule, the rule of how life is actually
lived by the masses, and especially by those whom a politician of some
substance once described as 'all antennae and no brains', or something to that
effect.
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If, on subatomic terms, protons are polar to
electrons as positively charged elements to negatively charged ones, then it
would not be unreasonable to suppose that a contrary polarity of sorts would
exist between neutrons and photons, as though between neutral elements that
nonetheless had contrary biases, with neutrons, say, displaying a positive bias
and photons, by contrast, a negative one, in keeping with a kind of juvenile
gender disposition analogous, in human terms, to sons and daughters as opposed,
like protons and electrons, to fathers and mothers.
Normally, I do not attach much significance to
the concept of the 'nuclear family', with mothers behaving as electron
equivalents and fathers, by contrast, as proton equivalents; for it has always
seemed to me, contrary to the accepted wisdom, that men revolve around women,
as around those who need to gravitate from photons to electrons, or daughters
to mothers, in order to fulfil themselves as women, with offspring, whether
in the guise of sons or daughters, neutron or photon equivalents, in turn
revolving around them, since the basic meaning of life for females is
reproduction, and beauty (coupled to love) would not be of much use if it
didn't lead to some kind of maternal pride (coupled to maternal strength) more
or less as a matter of natural course.
But there are, to be sure, grounds for
accepting that, in some respects, mothers revolve around fathers, like
electrons around protons in the atom, as in the adoption, following marriage,
of the husband's surname, which is also applied to any children resulting from
the marriage that will nonetheless be closer to the mother in terms of whom
they mostly or effectively relate to and are dependent on. But, generally
speaking, I do not believe it can be systematically maintained that, other than
in certain domestic and cultural matters, wives revolve around husbands when,
to all intents and purposes, they spend much of their time revolving around
kids, that is to say, looking after their children and facilitating, as far as
possible, their growth in terms of how they are raised. The nuclear theory of
the family, as of marriage, seems to me somewhat cosmetic in relation to the
underlying forces which both seduce and control men, making them, in
Baudelaire's memorable phrase, 'slaves of a slave', or a kind of adjunct, that
is, to the maternal sway.
++++++
Certainly photography and especially what is
photogenic, like beautiful women, would suggest an association with photons,
with the emission or giving off of light, so to speak, from some beautiful
source partial, in the case of females, to drawing on the heat of love
precisely to facilitate this process, and one may suppose, continuing with
human analogues, that if there is indeed a negative bias to photons, the bias
of beauty is towards pride, which would be akin to a descent, or 'fall', of
females from daughters to mothers, as from photons to electrons, in gender
contrast to the corresponding ascent, or 'rise', of males from sons to fathers,
as from neutrons to protons, presuming upon a positive bias to the 'sexual
neutrality' of neutrons, so that one would have an effective switch of axis
from the polarity of photons with neutrons, or daughters with sons, to the
polarity of electrons with protons, or mothers with fathers, the former axis
effectively state-hegemonic in terms of a polarity between the northwest (metachemical) and southeast (physical) points of what I
customarily term 'the intercardinal axial compass',
and the latter axis effectively church-hegemonic in terms of a polarity between
the southwest (chemical) and northeast (metaphysical) points thereof.
Hence instead of a polarity between daughters
(or virgins) and sons, as between photons with a negative bias and neutrons with
a positive one, we would have, with maturity, a polarity between mothers and
fathers, electrons and protons, the one negative and the other positive, or
tending to impregnate what would otherwise remain virginal if not barren. But
even if fathers are polar to mothers, as metaphysics to chemistry, on the
church-hegemonic axis, one should not forget that not only is 'the Father', as
a religious term, not
representative of the soulful fulcrum of metaphysics, but it is limited to
Christian usage and cannot be applied to metaphysics in nature without due
qualification, as though to a human extrapolation from winged seed-pods on
certain species of tree, which can be given a reproductive interpretation. Such
a pre-Christian 'father', as is germane to sexual reproduction, is no more
Christian than the 'father' that precedes nature in the Cosmos, and neither is
it germane to what succeeds nature in both Christian humanism and, to
anticipate the future, cyborgistic transcendentalism.
It certainly constitutes a mode of metaphysics and even, in a limited sense, of
godliness, one more heathen than either pagan or Christian. But it is far from
being germane to the ultimate mode of metaphysics, never mind the penultimate
mode which, in the West, has been symbolized by the Catholic Christ 'on high',
sitting, post-Crucifixionally, on the 'right-hand'
side of the so-called Father, meaning the Old Testament Creator, and, in the
East, by the Buddha and the practice less of prayer than of transcendental
meditation.
Both Roman Catholic Christianity and Buddhism
have superseded the natural mode of metaphysics in father-centred sexual
reproduction, just as that could be said to have superseded the peace-pipe
smoke rings of cosmos-oriented metaphysics deriving, in all probability, from a
Saturnian blueprint in the Solar System. Yes,
Christianity may have appropriated sexual reproduction to itself and sought to
tame or circumscribe it within acceptable boundaries, but the 'Our Father' of
Christianity is still distinct from the coital father whose sexually
reproductive inclinations pre-date anything specifically Catholic, being 'god
in nature' as opposed to 'god in mankind' or 'god in cyborgkind',
the latter of which, when it finally materializes, will not, like 'god in
mankind', Jesus Christ, be antithetical to 'god in nature', but to 'god in
cosmos', whether this god be metaphysically cosmic or, indeed, metachemically cosmic and, hence, less fatherly than
motherly or even daughterly, as it were, in her virginal vacuity and
quasar/black hole-like 'outgoingness'.
The neutron equivalence, to speak
metaphorically, fancies the photon equivalence, who knows how to 'strut her
stuff' and generate spiritual light, augmented, it may well be, by cosmetic
light, but he isn't sure whether he wants to turn into a proton equivalence in
nature vis-à-vis an electron equivalence there, fearing that marriage will cost
him dear, and not simply in a financial sense. So he holds back from marital
commitments, as from a change of axis.
++++++
The medieval concept of marriage within the
Catholic framework was designed to identify the bride with the Church and the
bridegroom with Christ, as though in a union between Christ and the Church.
Which is actually pretty odd, since to limit the Church to the bride is to
reduce it, 'Mother Church-wise', to a merely Marian institution, whereas to
identify the bridegroom with Christ is to reduce Christ to the status of
someone who marries in nature rather than, in following his own advice, leaves
women (mother, sister, wife, daughter, or whatever) to 'take up the Cross' and
become fully humanist or, better, quasi-transcendentalist, the object of
Christian worship as leading to the resurrectional
transcendence of 'the world' of natural limitations and, hence, to whatever falls
short of the Christian ideal, the ideal of a celibacy-derived humanistic
metaphysics at one remove from natural metaphysics and its matrimonial union
with natural chemistry, of husband with wife in what, despite Christian
endeavours to appropriate and even vitiate it, is fundamentally a
pre-Christian, even heathen, reality deriving not from the Church but from
nature. Monks may not have compromised with 'the world', but the Church, as a
state-sanctioned institution, had no option but to do so and strive to regulate
marriage in accordance, as far as possible, with Christian principles,
including, not least, the practise of monogamy.
Having suggested a kind of gender polarity
between electrons and protons, the former negative and the latter positive
(vacuum and plenum?), chemistry and metaphysics on the one hand, and between
photons and neutrons, the former neutral with a negative bias and the latter
neutral with a positive one (anti-vacuum and pro-plenum?), metachemistry
and physics on the other hand, I should add that, in terms of the contrasting
axes (church-hegemonic/state-subordinate and
state-hegemonic/church-subordinate), things are never quite that simple or
straightforward.
For we also have to consider the same gender polarities,
as it were, between chemistry and pseudo-metachemistry
vis-à-vis pseudo-physics and metaphysics in the church-hegemonic case, and
between metachemistry and pseudo-chemistry vis-à-vis
pseudo-metaphysics and physics in the state-hegemonic case or, rather, cases,
since there is a gender distinction between the former and latter polarities on
each axis, whether church- or state-hegemonic. Therefore one could opt for a
subatomic parallel to each of these same gender polarities, bearing in mind
that anything 'pseudo' (and gender subordinate) derives its existence from an
'anti' position that is its precondition.
So in the church-hegemonic/state-subordinate
case of the chemical to pseudo-metachemical polarity
we shall have a subatomic parallel with electrons and what could be called
pseudo-photons (deriving from anti-photons) coupled, on the male side of the
gender divide, with a pseudo-physical to metaphysical polarity that gives us a
subatomic parallel with what could be called pseudo-neutrons (deriving from
anti-neutrons) and protons, whereas in the state-hegemonic/church-subordinate
case of the metachemical to pseudo-chemical polarity
we will have a subatomic parallel with photons and what could be called
pseudo-electrons (deriving from anti-electrons) coupled, on the male side of
the gender divide, with a pseudo-metaphysical to physical polarity that gives
us a subatomic parallel with what could be called pseudo-protons (deriving from
anti-protons) and neutrons. All very contentious from a scientific standpoint,
to be sure, but philosophical logic compels me to draw such parallels and allow
for the possibility, if not inevitability, of subatomic pseudo-elements in
axial polarity to the hegemonic subatomic elements, whether noumenal
(ethereal) or phenomenal (corporeal), absolute or relative.
******