From the Apparent to the Essential
MICHAEL: I
know that, in this day and age, one sometimes encounters men with long hair and
women with short hair, but in general it is the other way around, and this has
often puzzled me. I mean, why should a
woman's hair be longer than a man's?
LIAM: The
obvious answer to your question is that women allow their hair to grow
longer. But if you probe beneath the
surface to the, as it were, moral or metaphysical implications of such a
tendency, you will find, I think, that women wear their hair longer than men because
they are more natural, as a rule - not, as might at first be supposed, because
it necessarily makes them look prettier.
Being closer to nature than men, it is natural for women that what grows
naturally should be encouraged to grow rather than be cut short. Their acquiescence in the natural order of
things is greater, on the whole, than a man's.
MICHAEL: An interesting theory, I must admit! Perhaps that explains why women generally
grow their fingernails longer than men as well?
LIAM: Yes,
I believe so, since fingernails are no less natural than hair. Having short hair and fingernails is the mark
of a being who desires to keep nature down, so to speak, and prevent it from
dominating him. The
mark of a more civilized being - in short, of a man. Now for this reason a man, when he is truly
civilized, tends to trim his beard or, better still, shave his face clean every
day. A clean-shaven face is a more
civilized-looking face than one with a beard or a moustache on it, even when
the latter are regularly trimmed. What
grows naturally, in this context, has been removed or, at any rate, curtailed
in the interests of an artificial and, hence, civilized appearance.
MICHAEL:
You embarrass me slightly, since I habitually sport a beard, albeit one that is
regularly trimmed. Nevertheless I am
sure you have a point, seeing as the majority of men tend, these days, to
prefer a clean-shaven face to a bearded one, just as they also prefer short
hair to long hair - at least on their own sex.
LIAM: Yes,
the heyday of the hippy cult of long hair, beards, moustaches, bell-bottoms,
and sandals has well and truly passed now, which is why long hair on men is
seen much less frequently than was the case in the late 1960s and early
1970s. A majority of that generation have
abandoned long hair for a more civilized appearance; they have returned to the
ongoing masculine trend of evolution instead of being in rebellion against it,
as youths almost invariably are.
MICHAEL:
Are you implying that the hippy cult was reactionary?
LIAM: Yes,
up to a point; though I am aware that there were progressive aspects to it,
like rock music, psychedelic drugs, festivals, the desire for peace, and so
on. But long hair on young men wasn't
one of them, since connoting with a naturalistic and, hence, feminine
predilection which could only be at loggerheads with the male-biased character
of the age. Rather than showing a
contempt for nature by cutting their hair short, these young men preferred, in
this respect, to identify with it, and so adopt a lifestyle that was partly
reactionary and, in effect, neo-pagan.
It was almost as though they had decided to opt-out of the evolutionary
pressures on their own sex in response to the fact that women were rebelling
against their traditional role in society by wearing jeans, using
contraceptives, travelling about the world more freely, taking jobs, studying
for degrees, and generally expressing themselves in ways which their
grandmother's generation wouldn't have understood, let alone attempted. The roles of the sexes seemed, at that point
in time, to have been reversed or, at any rate, cross-fertilized. A man could wear a pair of lightweight
sandals as shamelessly as a woman could wear a pair of monkey boots. The only thing one didn't see men doing, as a
rule, was wearing skirts, which just goes to show that, despite their long
hair, there were definite limits to the degree of reactionary neo-paganism they
permitted themselves.
MICHAEL:
Just as well, I think! However, now that
most of the males of our generation have returned to the masculine fold as
short-haired, shoe- or boot-wearing individuals, would it not seem that the
females have carried on as before, preferring jeans to skirts a lot of the
time?
LIAM: Yes,
in quite a number of cases, and for the very sound reason that the overall
trend of evolution is towards a supermasculine
society in which women become progressively more 'masculinized',
and thus effectively acquire the status of 'lesser men'. Of course, not all young women frequently
wear jeans, but most of them do at least wear pants of one description or
another, which is a step in the right direction. Yet a majority of them are still pretty
feminine, as can be borne-out by the fact that, in addition to wearing skirts
or dresses, they also wear their hair fairly long and allow their fingernails
to grow longer than would be acceptable on a man. They may shave their armpits, but only a
comparatively small minority of them are given to short hair, and these aren't
necessarily the most sophisticated types either! As a rule, women prefer their hair to hang
down, in confirmation of their basic adherence to nature and naturalistic
criteria in general. And, by a similar
token, they prefer to grow their fingernails.
MICHAEL: As
also to paint them, which must surely indicate that they desire to bring a
degree of civilization to bear on their natural appearance and thereby improve
it.
LIAM:
Undoubtedly. Although one should beware
of assuming that a woman who regularly uses make-up of one kind or another is
necessarily more civilized than those who don't. Generally speaking, this won't, I think, be
the case. For there are also instances,
perhaps subconscious, in which make-up is used not so much to enhance the
natural ... as to draw attention to it, to become a kind of body art
reminiscent of the art practised by primitives, both male and female, in the
interests of a crude degree of civilization.
After all, before man put art on walls or canvases, and thereby made it
partly transcendental, he applied it to himself, and to some extent this is
what many women still do, since insufficiently psychically-evolved to prefer
the former to the latter. Even the
appreciation of a great painter's work is if not beyond them then certainly
less interesting to them than the application of make-up to their face. And so, at heart, they remain primitives,
preferring the mundane to the transcendent.
Admittedly, there are women who prefer to study or create works of fine
art than to paint themselves, and therefore don't wear make-up, at least not
conspicuously. But they are by no means
a majority, as I think you would have to agree.
MICHAEL:
Indeed! Although if what you say about
not wearing make-up is true, then it follows that, as a rule, only the most
sophisticated women will tend to avoid it, since they prefer to adopt a
masculine attitude towards life in pursuance of certain intellectual or
spiritual goals.
LIAM: Oh,
absolutely! The paradox of the situation
is that while make-up constitutes the application of civilization to nature, it
only does such on a crude and relatively primitive level. For even the most tastefully made-up woman is
still drawing attention to appearance instead of transcending it by
concentrating on essence, i.e. on her spiritual or intellectual interests. Instead of behaving like a 'lesser man', for
whom intellectual matters are of greater importance, her allegiance to nail
varnish or lipstick emphasizes her status as a woman, or a creature for whom
appearance, and hence beauty, is paramount.
But the truly liberated, progressive woman eschews such make-up, since
she is above the practice of body art and thus insists that she be respected
for her cultural and intellectual abilities - to be regarded, in effect, as a
'lesser man'.
MICHAEL: A
fascinating theory! And doubtless one
that explains why it is normally the less-educated and least intellectual women
who sport the brightest nails. Could the
shift from appearance towards essence, in recent decades, be the chief reason
why beauty in art has become so suspect?
LIAM: Oh
undoubtedly! For
beauty is ever aligned with appearance rather than with essence which, by
contrast, is a matter of truth.
Beauty is on the diabolic rather than the divine side of the
evolutionary divide, as, I think, Baudelaire maintained, and could only be
suspect in an age tending towards truth.
By being non-representational, or abstract, modern art signifies, at its
best, an emphasis on the essential rather than the apparent side of life, and
is accordingly omega-orientated: the enigmatic or nondescript appearance it
entails symbolizing the higher, internal world of truth instead of the lower,
external world of illusion or beauty. At
its worst, however, modern art isn't so much pro-transcendental as anti-natural,
content merely to distort the external world of nature and thus deprive it of
beauty, thereby assisting us to turn away from it. Much Expressionism is of this order, and
although we may not derive a great deal of aesthetic pleasure from such art, we
can't dismiss it as bogus or poor. On
the contrary, it is highly significant, since aesthetic pleasure is precisely
what we need to avoid if we are to acquire a greater respect for truth. And what applies to art applies no less to
music, literature, and sculpture.
MICHAEL: I
am sure you're right, though one's feelings, alas, can't always keep-up with
the pace of one's thoughts! Nevertheless
if beauty is a thing of the Devil, then it stands to reason that ugliness
should be embraced as a means to enlightenment, ugliness being beauty distorted
rather than the opposite of it, which is truth.
The preponderance of ugliness in much modern art would seem to
constitute a sort of Nietzschean 'transvaluation
of values' so necessary and crucial to the age.
LIAM: Indeed, and not just in modern art but in various other
aspects of modern life too, including the punk cult, which was more enlightened
than it may at first have appeared. By displaying their contempt for beauty,
punks at least demonstrated that they were on the road to salvation, if rather
indirectly so.... Incidentally, whilst on the subject of transvaluations,
you may be interested to learn that one of the most important transvaluations we need to make concerns the respective
status of light and darkness, the former having traditionally been equated with
spiritual enlightenment and, hence, good, while the latter was equated with
spiritual ignorance and, hence, evil.
MICHAEL:
Are you trying to tell me that light ought to be equated with evil instead of
good?
LIAM: Yes,
at any rate, when external; and for the simple reason that light stems from the
sun, which is equivalent to the diabolic creative force behind life and not to
its future divine consummation in transcendent spirit. External light is a matter of appearance, not
essence, and is therefore an inadequate symbol for God, which, ultimately,
could only be pure essence. The use of
the word 'light' to define God, as in the oriental term Clear Light of the
Void, betrays a diabolic orientation or, more specifically, the contradictory
application of apparent terminology to an essential context. Strictly speaking, transcendent spirit could
never be seen, since essence is at the furthest possible evolutionary remove from
appearance. Therefore if, at the inception
of evolution, the stars are perceptible as bright, one can only conclude that,
at the climax to evolution, transcendent spirit would be if not dark then, at
any rate, beyond sensuous perception - would, in fact, resemble a Black Hole,
or dense void of spirit, from a sensuous point-of-view. Which is why I have recently come to equate
Black Holes with Spiritual Globes, as I call manifestations of pure spirit en route,
as it were, to the Omega Absolute at the spiritual culmination of evolution.
MICHAEL: You could well be right, although the current scientific
theory tends to equate Black Holes with collapsed stars, as you probably know. But if a denser void, composed of compressed
spirit, were to appear to a telescoped eye as a sort of black hole in space,
then certainly the term Clear Light of the Void would be inadequate for
defining or suggesting God?
LIAM: Yes,
and consequently we ought perhaps to transvaluate
these traditional values, so that spiritual enlightenment comes to be
symbolized by respect for the darkness rather than for the light, the respect
of a person given to the inner light of his spirit. I, for one, have no difficulty, these days,
in regarding the night as a better time than the day, since we are then at a
further remove from the diabolic sustaining force of the sun. And this being the case, we are enabled to
cultivate spirit to a greater extent then than during the day, when the sun's
sensuous influence is never very far away.
Only with sleep do we slide into sensuality again, to experience, in
dreaming, a sort of night sun.
Curiously, however, what the night is to the day, winter is to summer,
which is to say, a time of year when one's part of the earth is at a greater
remove from the sun and, consequently, the conditions for cultivating spirit
are much more propitious. One could
describe summer as a pagan season and winter, by contrast, as a transcendental
one, a season when nature is stripped of its beauty to an extent which makes
the cultivation of essence, among human beings, more desirable than the
contemplation of appearance. Winter is
decidedly a masculine season, whereas summer is fundamentally feminine. Women are more in their element in summer,
for they can exploit the heat to show off their bodies and thus entrap men in
appearance. They also incline, as a
rule, to bright colours - yellows, reds, pinks, whites, bright blues, etc. -
rather than to dark ones, which tends to confirm what I have just said about
spiritual enlightenment having to do with darkness instead of light, since
bright sun-like colours are precisely what appeal to the majority of women.
MICHAEL:
Perhaps that also explains why priests and nuns dress in black, since black
could be said to approximate to the condition of transcendent spirit or, at any
rate, to the renunciation of the flesh, whereas white is too close to sunlight?
LIAM: Yes,
I think so and consequently I believe you will find that all those who are in
any way intellectually or spiritually advanced tend to prefer dark clothes to
bright ones - the latter, by contrast, appealing more to the spiritually
superficial. I, for one, have always
worn dark clothes, and I know of no intellectual of any standing who makes a
habit of wearing bright ones, like an attractive young woman bent on making
herself as phenomenally conspicuous as possible. Those, as a rule, who draw
attention to appearances are the superficial, the extrovert - in a word, the
heathen. Most people probably
wouldn't want to accept this truth, but that is only because, in our ostensibly-enlightened
but in reality morally ignorant age, they are more pagan than transcendental.
MICHAEL:
One can only suppose that fact to be particularly true of the fair sex, who
must constitute a majority of the 'most' in question.
LIAM: Indeed, and for reasons already touched upon, including the
retention of long hair, long fingernails, and make-up. But this is a consequence of the fact that
human life is caught between nature and an aspiration towards the supernatural,
and has not yet evolved to a wholly omega-oriented civilization. Such a civilization - post-dualistic and,
hence, transcendental - will only materialize in the future, following the
collapse of the partly diabolic, alpha-stemming ones. Then the drive towards sexual equality will
be much stronger than at present, since women won't be encouraged to emphasize
appearance at the expense of essence, but will become more spiritual, in
accordance with the requirements of a post-dualistic society.
MICHAEL:
You mean, they will be expected to wear their hair
short and to regularly clip their fingernails into the bargain?
LIAM: Quite
probably. Although you mention but two
aspects of what will doubtless be a large number of expectations, including,
one can only suppose, the avoidance of make-up.
Still, if women are to become more spiritualized, in
the interests of sexual equality, then they can hardly expect to carry on as
before, with specifically feminine allegiances to the natural order of
things. The emphasis on appearance must
be reduced with each step of evolutionary progress. For only by reducing appearance can essence
be encouraged to expand. The world has
not evolved at the expense of women, as certain deluded feminists like to
believe, but in spite of them, which is to say, in opposition to them. Where women were formerly in their
feminine/domestic element, as wives, mothers, courtesans, etc., they are now
being forced out of it by the pressures of a male-oriented technological and
urban society. It took men a long time
to evolve to this stage of evolution, for nature had the better of them right
up to the last century. And women,
needless to say, were an integral part of nature - not, as feminist theologians
prefer to believe, the victims of men!
That the bitter truth of the matter should have been coated with the
sugar of feminist theology ... is something I can quite understand. But there is a great deal of difference
between theology and philosophy, as all students of Schopenhauer will know, and
the philosopher's task, now as before, is to expound truth for the benefit of
those capable of appreciating it, which is to say, for the benefit of those who
aspire to rise towards the inner light.
That, at any rate, is what I believe I have done, and
whether or not you approve of the fact ... is a matter of complete indifference
to me. I have simply done my duty.