01-02/02/13
Those idiots who live surrounded by beauty,
within a beautiful environment and with a beautiful wife and beautiful kids and
all the rest of it, can only be dead to their souls. For to be aware of one's
soul, one's inner self, one has to suffer, to suffer ugly or trying or somehow
difficult circumstances that, when push comes to shove, cause one to recoil in
horror and revulsion, thereby obliging one, when not too distracted, to come to
terms with one's self, one's inner being, which enables one both to mentally
comment upon what is going on and, at the same time, to theoretically transcend
it, to draw certain conclusions, often philosophical or moral, about life and
one's relationship to the world, for better or worse.
This tendency of difficult circumstances to
drive one in or back upon oneself is the path to Truth in consequence of
disillusionment with the outside world, and in Truth (metaphysical truth),
inner values are considerably to the fore!
But females are not like males in this respect,
since the embodiments, as a rule, of beauty and therefore of that which
conduces, through seduction, towards 'the world', not least in respect of
appearances. Rarely will a female turn in physical disillusionment with 'the
world', that largely human construct, towards 'the Otherworld', so to speak, of
metaphysical truth. On the contrary, it is precisely then, under pressure of
difficult or trying circumstances, that their true nature, their will and
spirit, fight back and come to the fore, whether aggressively or, more usually
in connection with male children and even adults, compassionately, to offer
sympathy or encouragement.
For females, rooted in the Beautiful, as in
free will, do not aspire towards the otherworldly truths that are the product,
as a rule, of disillusionment precisely with that which, as 'the world', they
uphold, like the legendary caryatids of classical mythology. It is males who
are so inclined, and to that end they have devised institutional underpinnings
of their disillusionments in the more transcendental aspects of religion, which
offer them some hope of a 'better world' to come, one which is not 'of this
world' but somehow above and beyond it. Therein lies the core of Christian
faith as the possibility of divine redemption through a 'saviour' who will
deliver from 'the world' those (males) who are not specifically 'of the world'
but capable, in their disillusionment, of embracing Truth and thereby opting
for 'Kingdom Come'.
In war one side gets stronger (and more female)
whilst the other side gets weaker (and more male), like
In this world, the male struggle (towards
Eternity) is always an uphill (Calvary-like) one, and the male is, in
consequence, for ever 'up against it'. No disgrace to Germany for being
preponderantly of male character, but the fault, if anywhere, lies in a want of
self-understanding in relation to the implications of being male (and
secondary/abstract) rather than female (and primary/concrete), in a world
which, traditionally, has shown itself to be dominated by the latter. Perhaps,
where the Second World War was concerned, the fact of Hitler's Austrian
ancestry had a destabilizing effect upon German gender self-assessment?
The book collection, the record collection, the
collection of CDs and DVDs – all dead. Little or nothing that he would ever
read or listen to or watch again. Really, just a record of his past 'cultural'
spending, his tastes, his previous interest in amassing paperbacks and LPs and
audio cassettes and video cassettes and CDs and DVDs that now assumed, in their
various settings, their shelves and cases, their racks and boxes, a kind of
museum-like quality … of dead artefacts, kept because they had once held an
intellectual or musical or pictorial interest. And he himself barely alive,
buried beneath the various mounds of dead artefacts that he struggled, in vain,
to escape from, as though from a psychological imprint or curse or weight that
bore down upon him with ironic indifference.
He who had once been alive was now virtually as
dead as the books, records, tapes, CDs and DVDs of his vast collection of
cultural products. At any rate, he was dead to them, having
lived through them and sucked what nourishment he could from
them, from some more than others, until his ego was proportionately bloated and
his soul possessed by their literary or musical or pictorial content. He had,
in a sense, outgrown them, but they had left their various marks, some deeper
than others, and now he himself was a product, in varying degrees, of their
manifold influences, if something of a rebellious product who still struggled,
under a mountain of these external influences, to find himself or, rather, his
self, in spite of the immense difficulty of doing so in a life characterized –
and marked – by the products of so many other selves from whom, he knew, one
could never entirely escape. For even dead things exert an influence on the
living, though less of an influence than when he was 'dead to himself' and
'alive' to them, succumbing, with youthful enthusiasm, to their artificially
resurrected or simulated 'lives'.
A female has to love others or she'll hate
herself. A male, by contrast, has to love himself or he'll hate others. A
'happy compromise' allows the female to love someone who loves himself, so that
she ends-up adopting a number of his views, some of his tastes, a few of his
habits, etc., in what effectively amounts to a male-hegemonic situation that
degenerative and barbarous detractors stigmatize as chauvinistic in relation to
what is, by any accounts, an 'unhappy age'.
But, of course, the aforementioned 'happy
compromise' is actually geared towards reproduction, and thus the acquirement,
by the female in particular, of somebody, namely the child, who will love and
need her more than he loves or needs himself. Talk about giving an inch in
order to take the proverbial mile …
The more he thought, the less he wrote. The
more she wrote, the less she thought. There are thinkers who write and writers
who think, but there are also thinkers who do not write and writers, one has to
say, who do not think, and they stand, in female and male terms, at opposite
poles of what I like to regard as the church-hegemonic/state-subordinate axis,
like, musically speaking, electronica and rock. But in between, yet still
apart, come the thinkers who write and the writers who think, like regressive
electronica and progressive rock, as though symptomatic of a more androgynous
gender constitution in which either the male position (or pole) is compromised
by female predilections or, alternatively, the female position (or pole) finds
itself compromised by male predilections, the former analogous, as noted, to
what I like to call regressive electronica, the latter to progressive rock.
Yet writer and thinker are as symptomatic of
the hegemonic poles in chemistry and metaphysics of the
church-hegemonic/state-subordinate axis as … speaker and reader of the
hegemonic poles in metachemistry and physics of the
state-hegemonic/church-subordinate axis, and whilst there are doubtless
speakers who, in female vein, do not read and readers who, in male vein, do not
speak, like jazz singers and orchestral musicians, there are also speakers who
read and readers who speak, as though symptomatic of a more androgynous gender
constitution in which either the female pole (or position) is compromised by
male predilections or the male pole (or position) finds itself compromised by
female predilections, like presumably and analogously what could be called
instrumental jazz and vocal classical, the former arguably akin to a
progressive kind of jazz and the latter to a regressive kind of classical,
since progress always accrues, it seems to me, to a male predilection within a
female context and regression, by contrast, to a female predilection within a
male one, whereby instrumentality in the one case and vocals in the other
presents us with a departure from the axial alpha and omega of singing and
playing that is analogous, in literary terms, to the speaker who reads and to
the reader who speaks, and therefore stands at an androgynous remove from the
speaker on the one hand and the reader on the other, as from the sensual and
sensible polarities of the state-hegemonic/church-subordinate axis.
For the more she speaks, the less she reads.
And the more he reads, the less he speaks. The speaker and the reader are as
polar on the state-hegemonic axis as the thinker and the writer on the
church-hegemonic one, with the speaker and writer no less female in their
respective axial ways than the thinker and reader male in terms of a noumenal
and phenomenal, or ethereal and corporeal, distinction of axis.
But if the speaker is polar to the reader and
the thinker polar to the writer, then the speaker and the thinker are axially
antithetical on absolute (noumenal) exclusive terms, whereas the writer and the
reader are only axially antithetical on relative (phenomenal) exclusive terms,
like rock and classical as opposed, most exclusively, to jazz and electronica.
Nor are the 'androgynous' in-betweens any less
or more axially exclusive, since progressive (instrumental) jazz is still at an
absolute axial remove from regressive electronica, which tends towards vocals
at the expense of instrumentality, whilst progressive rock, which tends towards
instrumentality at the expense of vocals, is still at a relative axial remove
from regressive classical, with its incorporation of vocals at the expense of
instrumentality.
The speaker who reads is no less incompatible
with the thinker who writes than the writer who thinks with the reader who
speaks. Only the thinker who writes and the writer who thinks have anything
mutually in common, if from opposite points of view on the
church-hegemonic/state-subordinate axis.
Likewise, only the speaker who reads and the
reader who speaks have anything mutually in common, if from opposite points of
view, on the state-hegemonic/church-subordinate axis. On the other hand, having
something in common on what could be called lopsided terms, as between the
thinker who writes and the writer or the writer who thinks and the thinker, not
to overlook the speaker who reads and the reader or the reader who speaks and
the speaker, can of course logically exist. But it would remain distinctly
one-sided, neither mutual, as described above, nor exclusive, as between axial
antitheses, and quite distinct from the thinker and the writer on the one hand
and the speaker and the reader on the other who, if not axially exclusive, are
only inclusive of each other on polar axial terms, having little or nothing in
common.
