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.

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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